


Only Just a Dream

by ImprobableDreams900



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Amnesia, Coma, M/M, Mild Language, Mild descriptions of violence, POV Carlos, The weirdness of Night Vale explained, partial AU, possible major character death (no spoilers here!)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2015-01-15
Packaged: 2018-03-07 15:00:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 27,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3176541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImprobableDreams900/pseuds/ImprobableDreams900
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Cecil falls into a coma following a car crash, Carlos is desperate to save him in any way he can, including testing out a prototype device that projects him into Cecil's dreaming mind. </p><p>Amidst the strange people and places in the dream town in Cecil's head, Carlos must find Cecil and convince him to wake up, but there's a hitch: Carlos can't remember anything before his arrival in Night Vale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Accident

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! Please note that I am not, nor do I know, any medical professionals. Everything I know about comas and the various medical procedures mentioned below I learned from-- you guessed it-- Wikipedia. My apologies for any mistakes made.

The day began like any other, with Carlos paging through the morning newspaper at the kitchen table in the apartment he and Cecil shared. 

Cecil wandered into the kitchen in a robe, hair still uncombed, and Carlos remarked that the _Science through History_ exhibit at the California Science Center looked good.

"We should go sometime," Carlos said, skimming the details of the article. "From science in Greek times all the way through to the present. Their techniques as well as the scientists themselves...ooh, they've got some of my favorites: Nicholas Copernicus, Schrödinger...Newton of course, and Einstein...Nikola Tesla! Glad he's finally getting appreciated. And we could see the _Endeavour_ while we're there."

"How about we go today?"

Carlos looked up in surprise. They had nothing planned for today, just another lazy Saturday, but Carlos was unused to doing things without at least a day's planning in between. Cecil's spontaneity always surprised him.

"Well..." he began uncertainly, fishing around for a reason to delay.

"Oh, come on, Carlos, it'll be fun! You never get to see enough science-y things."

"Because you'd be bored out of your skull," Carlos replied slowly. "I don't know why _you_ want to go at all."

Now it was Cecil's turn to be on the defensive. "Well...it's because I like seeing you happy, of course! And science makes you happy."

Carlos smiled to himself as Cecil, grinning broadly in victory, set about making toast.

"I could go by myself, you know," Carlos tried again. It wasn't that he didn't want Cecil to come with; he just knew he'd feel rushed going through the museum because he didn't want to waste Cecil's time. And let's face it, Cecil was completely clueless when it came to science—he couldn't tell the difference between an atom and an enzyme if his life depended on it. Carlos had tried explaining some of the charts of his research to Cecil once, at his request, with little success. He just wasn't sure Cecil would get anything out of the exhibit and didn't want to waste his boyfriend's time.

"What, you don't want me with you?" Cecil pretended to be hurt as he pulled the jam out of the fridge. "You said it's a history of science, yeah? You can walk me through it from the beginning. If the Greeks can get a handle on it, then I can too."

Cecil had a point, and Carlos couldn't deny he was beginning to warm to the idea. They had nothing else to do all day, after all. And then afterwards they could stop at the ice cream shop on Mission Street that Cecil liked so much. 

"Yeah, okay," Carlos gave in.

Cecil grinned at him again and came over to give Carlos a kiss on the cheek. "I'll be fine. It'll be fun, you'll see."

 

\--------

 

Half an hour later, they climbed into Carlos' car and the scientist pulled out into the road. There was a major traffic jam on the interstate going into the city proper, so Cecil pulled up the GPS on his phone and directed Carlos along another route that skirted the city center. Carlos turned onto Jefferson Boulevard as Cecil directed him.

"Keep on here for seven blocks," Cecil instructed.

Six blocks down, Cecil recounted a joke he'd read on the internet the other day: "Hey, Carlos."

"Yeah?" he asked, keeping his eyes on the road.

"You should be happy," Cecil said, "because today you are one day closer to the day you will eat your next tray of nachos." Cecil waited for a moment, as though in lead up to the big punch line. "But what if I die today, you ask?" He paused. 

Carlos glanced over at Cecil and saw he was waiting expectantly.

"But what if I die today?" Carlos asked obligingly, with a slight blush.

"Well then today is nacho lucky day!"

Carlos laughed and turned his head to look over at Cecil, at his beautiful boyfriend with his silly internet jokes and his easy smile. Carlos wondered at his incredible luck in having met him in the first place, of having gotten the opportunity to get to know him so well—and that's when it happened.

Something smashed into Carlos’ side of the car with the force of a bomb, impacting a couple feet behind the driver’s door. The vehicle spun, snapping Carlos’ head to the side as he tried to yank the wheel away from the force. Cecil cried out a fraction of a second before the airbags exploded, throwing Carlos back into his seat. He could feel the car skidding sideways across the road, and then Carlos’ stomach abruptly dropped as the car flipped. The sound of screaming metal intensified but still they were moving forwards. Then there was an abrupt jolt and a burst of sparks and then the car finally screeched to a wobbling halt, rocking back and forth on its roof.

Carlos sat frozen for a few seconds, processing what had happened. His hands were shaking. The airbag was pressed against his face, and all he could see was its tawny white surface. It slowly began to deflate with a low hiss, and Carlos coughed, thankfully breathing in fresh air. The seatbelt dug into his chest as it bound him to his chair. The car was still upside down. He turned his head to the side, trying to get a glimpse of Cecil, and his heart skipped a beat.

"Cecil?" he said, but all that came out was a hoarse whisper. "Cecil?" he tried again, louder this time.

Cecil did not respond. He hung limp and motionless, his seatbelt pinning him to his upside-down chair as the airbag below him deflated pathetically.

Carlos raised his right arm, wincing as pain shot through his shoulder, and reached for Cecil. It took him a couple tries to find his boyfriend’s shoulder. He shook it, but Cecil remained motionless.

"Cecil?" he repeated, fear choking his voice. Carlos shook him again, harder this time. Cecil's head weaved back and forth with Carlos' shaking, but he showed no signs of reviving.

_Oh God oh God oh no._

" _Cecil?_ " Carlos' voice went up an octave. His heart hammered in his chest and an icy fear gripped him all of a sudden, causing him to shiver violently. He retracted his hand and fumbled with the seat belt latch, his hand shaking.

A shadow fell across the driver's side window and Carlos looked up, his vision blurring briefly.

"Oh my God! Are you okay?" a female voiced asked, high-pitched with fear. "I'm so sorry! I—I didn't even see you, I didn't realize...try not to move. I'm calling 911," the woman continued, her voice shaking as much as Carlos’ hand.

Carlos ignored the voice and turned back to Cecil, still fumbling with his seat belt. On the third try he found the button, and the belt retracted with a sharp hiss.

Carlos fell onto the roof of the car with a thud as the seat belt released him. He untangled himself onto his hands and knees and crawled towards Cecil, still suspended above him like an insect caught in a spider’s web.

Carlos reached up, about to touch Cecil's face, when his eyes lighted on the far side of Cecil's face, the half not visible from the driver's seat.

Carlos' stomach clenched as he ran his hand along the right side of Cecil's face, smearing the blood back. It dripped down the contours of his face and along his cheekbones, standing out bright red in his light hair. The passenger side window had spiderwebbed and shattered, the lines radiating out from a center point that was smeared red.

"No, no, oh no..."

Carlos shakily reached up and jabbed at Cecil’s seat belt release button. It too released with a hiss, and Carlos caught Cecil clumsily as he fell.

Carlos arranged him as best he could in his lap, cradling his head. His hand located the point in Cecil's bright hair that was the warmest and the wettest and put pressure on it. Blood welled up between his fingers but he kept his hand there.

His other hand flitted around, smoothing out the wrinkles in Cecil's shirt and brushing the hair back from his eyes.

After an immeasurable amount of time, the authorities arrived. Carlos realized this because the hand clutching Cecil's head was suddenly dancing with blue and white light, and then someone was tearing the passenger door off its hinges with a sound not unlike the one Carlos' heart was currently making. All of a sudden someone was grabbing Carlos by the shoulder and pulling at him. He pulled back, and then realized that there were hands clutching at Cecil, pulling him away, pulling him from Carlos' grasp...

Carlos made a desperate grab for his boyfriend, latching his fingers onto Cecil's belt.

But then someone tore his hands from Cecil, and Carlos made another grab but he was pushed back by a firm hand on his chest. Then there was a bright light shining in Carlos' left eye, but all he registered was that his hand was no longer tangled in Cecil's hair but was still slick and wet... 

And then Cecil was gone, and Carlos was being pulled from the car and up into a standing position, but his feet had forgotten how to work. He stumbled as several pressures around him led him to a stretcher, and after a moment or two Carlos registered that he was sitting down, and someone was wiping down his left hand with a wet cloth, but Carlos' eyes never left Cecil and the stretcher he was being laid down in.

Someone snapped their fingers in front of Carlos’ face, but he stared through them. He tried to get up, tried to go to Cecil as his stretcher was rolled away into the waiting ambulance, but his feet couldn't seem to get any traction. The lights on the ambulance as it pulled away were flashing in sync with Carlos' heartbeat.

 

\--------

 

Carlos didn't remember what happened in between, but all of a sudden he was sitting in the back of an ambulance. He took a sharp breath and nearly passed out as the oxygen rushed into his system. He coughed, twice, and someone rubbed his back.

"Hey, hey, it's okay. You're okay. Shhh."

Carlos looked to the side and saw a female paramedic sitting next to him.

"Take it easy," offered another voice from his left.

Carlos looked the other way, at another paramedic, this one male, taking his blood pressure.

Carlos instinctively tried to retract his arm, but the paramedic grabbed it again with practiced ease.

Carlos cast his eyes around the ambulance, taking in the hanging medical equipment, the swaying of the vehicle, the muted sound of sirens. Everything came back.

"Cecil!" he exclaimed, looking around wildly. "Cecil, where is he, is he okay?"

"It's okay, it's okay," the female paramedic repeated, increasing the pressure on Carlos' shoulder to keep him sitting.

"There goes that reading," the male paramedic sighed, unstrapping the blood pressure cuff.

Carlos looked around wildly, eyes skimming over the empty surfaces, looking for a sign, a clue...

"It's okay; he's not here, he's already at the hospital," the woman supplied reassuringly. "We'll be there very soon."

"Was he okay? Will he be okay?" Carlos demanded, turning his attention to the woman, fixing his gaze on her squarely, intently.

Her face was all reassuring lines, though Carlos noticed her smile didn’t reach her eyes. "I'm sure we'll find out when we get to the hospital, dear."

"You are Carlos?" asked the man, looking at his phone.

"Yeah," Carlos replied, looking away from the female paramedic.

"Okay..." he poked at his phone. “Who was he? Cecil who? And was he on any medications?"

"Palmer. Um...Palmer. And no, not...not really." Carlos said, his voice skipping. The full impact of what had happened was beginning to register.

"We can do this later, if you'd like," the woman suggested, sending a pointed glance at the other paramedic.

"Sorry," the man said, finishing up whatever he was doing on his phone and pocketing it. "Docs wanted to know."

"How was he?" Carlos asked, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. He had to step back, look at this objectively. Had to distance himself from the problem. "Not too bad, right?"

She looked like she wanted to give him a hug, but didn’t. "I'm afraid I don't really know," she admitted. "Not my place to say, sorry."

Carlos sat for a moment and mused on this, replaying what had happened in his head, trying to pinpoint the exact moment where it had all gone wrong, trying to run the numbers, trying to find a version of events in which the wound was minor, easily survivable, and Cecil was going to be just fine...

The ambulance pulled into the hospital and he was helped out by the female paramedic. They led him into the ER and he was promptly checked over. He was discharged an hour later with minor scrapes, a minor concussion, and strict instructions to report any aches or pains immediately, for insurance purposes. He begged to see Cecil, to get news of any sort, but all he heard was that the doctors were with him and Carlos couldn't see him yet. The nurses gave him some paperwork to fill out, and the cops showed up and talked to him, but everything seemed so hollow.

Once the cops had left, Carlos waited in the lobby, clothes rumpled and dirty. He couldn't bring himself to watch anyone or look at any of the magazines, so he sat with his hands between his knees and stared at the linoleum floor. As the seconds ticked by, it became harder and harder to convince himself that Cecil hadn't died and no one had remembered to tell him. He stared at the piece of small white tape on his left forearm, where there’d been a small cut. It wasn't right that he'd escaped with so little. He pictured over and over again the crimson spiderwebbed window until he felt sick to his stomach.

Over an hour later a nurse arrived and told him that he could see Cecil.

Carlos walked slowly down the hall, his eagerness to see Cecil suddenly flagging as the moment arrived. He had been told Cecil hadn't woken up yet.

He found the door and peered in cautiously, terrified of what he might see. The room was neat and tidy, painted hospital white and with only the one bed. A man with a doctor's coat remarkably similar to Carlos' very own lab coat stood on the far side of the bed, evidently waiting for Carlos' arrival.

Carlos took a few hesitant steps forward, his eyes riveted to the bed. The form there resolved itself into Cecil as Carlos approached. His eyes were closed and his face was relaxed into smooth, peaceful lines. His hair was clean and had been combed neatly back in a style Cecil wouldn't have tolerated for a second—or, at least, what little Carlos could see of it around the wide white bandage wrapped around Cecil's head. He looked a little paler than usual, but was otherwise himself, just a few small cuts along his cheek.

Carlos' legs suddenly felt very weak and he sat down. The doctor came around the bed and sat down on a second chair nearby.

"Carlos, I presume?" 

Carlos nodded weakly, still staring at Cecil.

"Dr. Greisen." He shook Carlos' hand.

Carlos tore his gaze from Cecil, turning to look at the doctor. "How is he?" His voice wasn't as strong as he would have liked.

"Not bad, considering."

"Considering?"

"Considering that he had a high- _g_ impact with a window. Luckily, he seems to have experienced very little physical damage apart from the wound to his head. Some minor bruising, same as you."

"Okay, bad news?" Carlos knew how this went.

Dr. Greisen glanced at Cecil before continuing. "His condition's stable, but it's not a good sign that he hasn't regained consciousness by now. It indicates severe brain trauma, and that can lead to all sorts of complications."

Carlos swallowed. "Like what?"

The doctor shook his head. "It's too early to tell. He may still be all right, just wake up and be perfectly fine. It's always a possibility."

"But not a likely one," Carlos guessed, a hint of bitterness in his voice.

"It all depends on how soon he wakes up,” the doctor said calmly. “If he's not showing signs of regaining consciousness in twelve hours, we'd like to do a CT scan, and maybe an fMRI."

Carlos nodded.

"Do you have any other questions right now?" he asked, standing up.

Carlos stared at Cecil, knowing he should have a million questions but unable to think of a single one. "Can I stay with him?" he asked finally.

"Of course," the doctor said. "There'll be a nurse in here shortly, and if you think of something else you can ask them." Dr. Greisen double-checked the clipboard on the end of Cecil's bed and, satisfied, swept out the door.

Carlos sank back into the chair, eyes still fixed on Cecil, and hardly noticed his departure.

 

\--------

 

Thirty-six hours later Carlos was called into a small room off the lobby.

He’d been home briefly some hours earlier, but didn’t stay long. The house was too quiet. The stillness, the wide open emptiness of the rooms...it was too much. He’d slept fitfully, exhaustion battling the ghosts of Cecil that walked in and out of the room as though he were already dead. Eventually he’d just taken a taxi back to the hospital, because he had nowhere else to go and no one he’d rather be with.

A nurse collected him from Cecil's room and led him to a small and sparsely furnished room. It was decorated with landscape paintings in neutral colors and comfortable-looking chairs upholstered in calm patterns. As Carlos took it all in, he had a feeling of sudden certainty that this was where they called the family to tell them the patient wasn't going to make it.

He was told Dr. Greisen would be along shortly and was left alone to ruminate.

Carlos tried sitting on one of the comfy-looking chairs, but he was too worried to sit still for more than two seconds before he stood up and started pacing. What had they called him here for? The results of the CT scan, surely. They must be bad. Maybe Cecil was dying. Maybe he had days to live, or hours. Or maybe he was going to be fine. Maybe all the tests indicated the best possible scenario. But then why the bad-news room? Surely they had a nicer room for the patients with good news, decorated with art with more than three colors—Carlos stopped walking and grabbed the back of one of the chairs. He could feel his heart hammering in his chest. He tried to calm himself with deep breaths, but whenever he got close he remembered Cecil's face streaked with blood and his heart rate jumped again. 

The door clicked open and Dr. Greisen appeared. He had a manila folder in his hand. Carlos immediately tried to read him to determine if the news was good or bad. His expression was serious but neutral.

"Sorry for keeping you waiting. Please have a seat." He gestured to the table.

Carlos sat down, the weight of the moment making him almost shiver in awful anticipation. Dr. Greisen seated himself opposite.

"The results from the CT and fMRI scans are back. I'm afraid the news could be better."

He glanced up at Carlos, but he remained silent. _Just get to the point._

"As you know, Mr. Palmer hasn't woken up yet," said Dr. Greisen. "It's still possible he could wake up at any time, but the longer the wait the lower the chance of him making a full recovery or even waking up at all." 

"What—what do you mean by that?" Carlos asked. He could feel it coming. 

"I'm afraid Mr. Palmer has entered into a coma."

Carlos sat back in the chair and felt the air rush out of him. Coma. It wasn't like he hadn't considered it, but hearing it said aloud—coma. That was serious. That was end of the road serious. That was forever serious.

Dr. Greisen continued in his infuriatingly calm manner, pressing forward like a soldier with orders to continue marching until he dropped. "He's not in a vegetative state, though. According to the fMRI, there's still a decent level of brain activity, which would indicate that he is partially conscious on a subconscious level—"

"Conscious—you mean he's dreaming?" Carlos asked.

The doctor seemed surprised Carlos had caught on. "Yes. We ran him through the CT scanner twice just to be sure, but it seems there's a remarkably low amount of physical damage to his brain—"

"So what's the problem?" 

Dr. Greisen fixed Carlos with a level gaze that said he was no stranger to delivering bad news. "Whatever reason he won't wake up is purely psychological."

"Psychological?" Carlos echoed, digesting this. "So...what? Does he need a neurologist, a...psychologist? Hypnotist?" 

The doctor shook his head slightly. "Whatever problem he's got, it's internal now, so only he can deal with it." 

Carlos' gaze fell to the color printouts in the folder to avoid looking the doctor in the eye. 

"So...nothing can be done?" His voice was flat. 

"Not at this point. Maybe talking with him would help; maybe he's just trapped in his own head trying to find a way out. He's registering brain activity, and quite energetically too, so whatever he's doing, it's quite active. Using lots of imagination. He just won't wake up."

"Doctor..." Carlos began, and then faltered. "Is there...is there any way of knowing more about whatever dreams he's in? If they're good ones?"

The doctor smiled slightly, but shook his head. "I'm afraid not." He gently pushed the manila folder across the table to Carlos and stood up. Carlos made no move to stop him as he excused himself with something about tending to his other patients.

Carlos spent some time paging through the readouts, staring at the cross-sections of Cecil's brain. He tried to find some hidden pattern in their colorful dapple, some message, some clue as to what Cecil was going through, but found nothing. When he'd sat there so long his fingers were starting to grow cold, he stood up, carefully placed the papers back into the manila folder one by one, and walked back to Cecil's room. He hovered at the threshold like he always did, each time steeling himself for Cecil's limp form. He walked over to the bed and resumed his regular post at Cecil's side. He trailed his hand into the bed and wrapped his fingers around Cecil's hand.

"Come on, Cecil. The doc says it's just a dream. That's all. A silly little dream. I'm here, Cecil. Don’t you want that ice cream I promised you? That shop on Mission Street…don’t you want to go? It’s a dream, Cecil, so please…just wake up. I'm waiting."

 

\--------

 

Four days later Carlos tracked down Dr. Greisen and cornered him in the hallway outside the break room. Seeing Carlos' rapid approach, he looked a little uncomfortable but not overly surprised. 

Carlos got straight to the point. "Listen, is there anything else you can do? Anything at all? Anything in testing, or untried, or just a theory, a therapy..."

The doctor shook his head.

"Don't give me that," Carlos said sharply. He hadn't slept more than a couple hours all week, and his nerves were fraying. He was running on caffeine and alcohol and desperation, but his voice was deceptively steady. "I'm a scientist. I know there're treatments, things under the radar, still being tested. There always are. Graduate students are always having crazy ideas. I'm willing to try anything. Everything."

The doctor sighed and cast a glance around before continuing in a lower tone. "I understand your concern, but some of these treatments are incredibly unsafe. He's much better off the way he is."

"With a...what's it now? A 20% chance? 10? Even a shot in the dark's better than that." Carlos' voice was getting a little loud and attracting glances from some nurses nearby. 

Dr. Greisen looked uncomfortable with the attention and lowered his voice even further. "Some of these ideas, they haven't been properly experimented with yet. Or they can't get past animal testing. They haven't even been approved for human testing, and no one—" 

"Every great discovery starts with one person willing to go ahead and take a chance. Look at me—" Carlos spread his arms wide. He was aware of how shabby and pathetic he looked, but didn’t care. "Ready and willing."

"I cannot recommend anyone to you," Dr. Greisen said, and his tone told Carlos that the conversation was at an end. "This is a respectable institution, and it would go against my oath to recommend something so foolish. Now if you excuse me, I have other patients to see to."

He extracted himself from Carlos' clutches, glared at the loitering nurses, who guiltily dispersed, and started off down the hallway.

"I'd do anything," Carlos shouted after him, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. "Anything, you hear?"

 

\--------

 

The doctors and nurses working at the hospital soon became accustomed to the quiet tawny-skinned man sitting in room 212, where Cecil had been moved after day three. He sat by the edge of the hospital bed, sometimes holding the comatose man's hand, other times just watching, sometimes talking softly.

One of the nurses, a young woman with a wide smile, approached him one day. She closed the door behind her with a soft click.

"Excuse me, sir," she said carefully, watching him for a reaction. 

Carlos glanced up. "Do I need to leave?"

"No, no. You're fine. Um...I overheard some of the nurses...your friend's in a coma?"

Carlos nodded. "Boyfriend," he corrected, though there didn’t seem to be much point.

"Look, I'm sorry..." she glanced behind herself at the closed door. “Strictly speaking I'm not supposed to be here...I'll leave whenever you want."

She had Carlos' full attention now.

"This—this isn't even mine." She plucked at the nurse' coat she was wearing, and then peered down at the plastic ID badge pinned on it in curiosity. "Look, my name's Matilda—actually, it's Dorothy Sundown, pleased to meet you." She extended her hand and Carlos shook it cautiously. She plopped herself down in the other visitor's chair. Well, she wasn't lying about not being a nurse, at least; she was far too cheery for that. 

"Why...?" Carlos began, but she took over for him.

"I'm here on my sister's behalf. Her name's Harriet, and she's a neurologist."

Carlos sat up straighter in his seat and cast half a glance at Cecil.

"She's here in LA, visiting the doctors at the hospital—old friends, you know? I tagged along...I'm doing some scouting for her."

"Scouting?" Carlos echoed.

Dorothy nodded. "Those nurses I overheard—they said you might be interested in... _other_ solutions to help your friend."

Carlos nodded, something like excitement shooting through him. Perhaps this was the solution...?

"My sister—she's got a treatment method that may work. It's kind of out there, though."

"What is it?"

"It's dangerous," she said. "I feel bad for asking, I've been told not to. Harriet's about given up—the first three subjects died. She wants to stop, but I know it can work. But, I mean—you'd have to be pretty crazy to try it."

Carlos leaned forward and locked eyes with her seriously. "I am pretty crazy.”

Dorothy grinned, a crazy wide smile that lit up her whole face. "Great! I heard you were a scientist, so I thought maybe you'd be a good fit. And it's never been tried on two people who know each other, so—"

"Two people?" Carlos echoed. 

"Oh! Sorry, getting ahead of myself. You'd be part of the process too."

Carlos frowned, his excitement faltering. He felt like he'd been punched in the stomach. He sat back. "This is some kind of practical joke, isn't it? ‘Let’s make fun of the desperate man whose boyfriend is in a coma—'”

Dorothy looked offended. "No, no! I promise."

"’Cause it's not funny.” Carlos’ voice was hard. 

"No, I swear! We’re legit. The fact that one of the subjects is healthy is the brilliance of it! Here—let me tell you about it." She gathered herself, straightening up and briefly closing her eyes. She took a steadying breath and opened her eyes. She gave him a mysterious smile and began what sounded like a rehearsed speech. 

"What does a comatose person experience while in a coma?" She quirked her eyebrow at him. "Do they dream, or is it just blank? Are they aware of their surroundings?

"It turns out, all three. It's different for everybody. Some people are aware but unable to move, others don't remember anything between passing out and waking up, and others still dream, unaware of their condition."

Carlos wasn't sure where this was going, but let her continue.

"And those of us who dream while sleeping regularly...how do we wake up? Sudden shocks wouldn't work for someone in a deep coma, but another way...it's much easier, I think you would agree, to wake up if you know you're dreaming.

"The method my sister has developed is astounding. After studying hundreds of comatose and non-comatose patients, she has found something amazing; if you analyze brain scans in a certain way—the specifics are way too technical for me—you can write it out as a wave form. Everyone has one, and each person’s is different. It’s sort of like your brain's signature, this exact pattern of electricity and thought. Because each person's wave is slightly different, we're all slightly out of sync with each other, on another frequency, if you will. Because of this, we're unable to read each other's thoughts...but what if we could? What if we could sync our brains with one another, operate on the same wavelength? We'd be able to read minds, project images...walk in dreams."

Carlos looked back at Cecil, the impact of her words setting in.

"Your friend is in a coma," Dorothy continued. "The prognosis is not good. According to the fMRI scans, he's dreaming. Using our method, we can sync your brain waves to match his, and you can enter whatever world he's in."

"So...like a Vulcan mind meld? Or _Inception_? Just zap me into his head? Isn't that dangerous?"

"Oh, yes." She sounded a little too cheery about that. "Because to get your brainwaves anywhere close to the same frequency, we have to move you into the same state."

"What—you want to put me in a coma?"

"More or less. Then we'll sync your brainwaves and, hopefully, you'll hop across into his head."

_"Hopefully?"_

"That's the theory, anyway. The last three pairs—all comatose John Does and volunteers from our team—died. Well, all except Harriet."

"Harriet? Your sister?"

"She tried the second time, after we lost Marty. We got her under all right, but then two weeks later she came out of it, and Jane Doe was still under. She got all worked up—wasn't herself for weeks. Said she got there, but couldn't find Jane Doe anywhere. After that she forbade any more testing, but Hailey went ahead with test three anyway, but her John Doe got pneumonia a week in and died, and we couldn't retrieve her in time." 

Just then there was a brisk knock on the door. Dorothy glanced around in alarm and jumped to her feet. She quickly tugged off the nurse's coat and lunged for Cecil. Carlos hurriedly stepped forward to intervene, but stopped when he saw that she was simply stuffing the stolen coat under Cecil’s pillow.

The door opened and a real nurse came in. Carlos and Dorothy muttered some excuses and made a quick exit. No sooner had they rounded the first corner when they bumped into Dr. Greisen and a tall woman with wavy black hair and a sharp suit.

"Dorothy!" said the woman, surprised. Dr. Greisen stopped and looked between the two of them. He frowned immediately and turned to his companion.

"I thought you said you'd given up this nonsense." His voice was ice.

"I did. She—Dorothy, what are you doing here?"

"Helping you, of course. Look who I found! Meet Carlos—he volunteers."

Carlos was caught between trying to properly introduce himself to the tall woman, whom he assumed was Harriet, avoiding Dr. Greisen's accusing glare, and mumbling that he hadn't really volunteered for anything quite yet.

"He most certainly does not," Harriet said. 

"He's a scientist—his friend's comatose and dreaming. I looked at the scans." 

"I will not have—" began Dr. Greisen, but Harriet cut him off. 

"Dorothy, we do not do this anymore," she said bitingly. The younger woman flinched. "It's too dangerous. And it didn't work anyway." 

"It doesn't sound—" began Carlos. 

"Sir, I'm so sorry to have taken up your time," Harriet interrupted, taking Carlos by the arm and steering him down the hall away from Dorothy. "I'm very certain it won't happen again. I am sure my sister has told you only good things, and most of them were probably exaggerated." Feeling a safe distance away, she released Carlos and turned to walk back to Dr. Greisen. Dorothy, who had trailed them, stopped her. 

"I told him about the dangers!" she protested. "He was cool with that." 

Carlos muttered something incomprehensible.

"We've lost enough people to this," Harriet said sharply, and Carlos detected a note of pain in her voice. "I refuse to lose another."

"It doesn't sound too bad..." Carlos said hesitantly.

She turned on him. "Did she tell you about the fact that you would have to locate your friend in a maze of his own mind? That you would have to convince him that this was all a dream, when it all looks so real? And the worst thing of all—that when we sync your brain waves and shift your consciousness to his body, we can only shift certain parts of the brain, only so much data? And that one of the pieces left behind is memory? Memory. You might very well get there, but you'd have no idea what to do then.

"Do you have any idea what that could do to you? Trapped in someone else's mind, where their horrors become your own, unable to recall a single thing about yourself? Because it might be a dream, but more often it's a nightmare, a terrible nightmare where the only thing you can see is locked doors and darkness, and where you're more certain than you've ever been in your whole life that there's someone right behind you, but you're rooted to the spot and can never turn around? When the only emotion you've felt in years is a bone-chilling fear that makes you want to scream and scream and scream but your lungs have no air? Trapped in a prison of someone else's making that you cannot escape and cannot even begin to understand? No, you are not doing this."

Carlos was silent. Dorothy looked like a puppy someone had kicked. Harriet started to turn away.

Carlos plucked up his courage and took a chance. "Because that's what happened to you? Because you were trapped in a nightmare and couldn't save her so you think no one else stands a chance?" 

Harriet spun back around.

"But you didn't know her," Carlos said, seeing the truth of his initial statement in her eyes. "You'd never met her. But I know Cecil. I know how he thinks, what he thinks of, what he likes, what he doesn't. I know that man better than he knows himself. Even in a nightmare, you think I couldn't find him? And that in any universe we find each other, I wouldn't try to save him?" 

Harriet looked at him harder, as though really registering him for the first time. 

"And on top of that, I'm a scientist. I'm objective—I won't get distracted. I can rationalize, and keep a level head. And you're not sounding very scientific yourself, for a neurologist. Beta testing failed? Just give up? How many years of hard work? If the theory is solid, then you just haven't created the right conditions yet. John Does? No medical history, then, no knowledge of their lives—maybe they were depressed, or crazy, or suicidal. And not having known them, even a little? Hell, if I were in a coma and you lot showed up in my head, I'd sure box you out! John Does. Hardly what you could call a control group." 

She looked him up and down and for a moment Carlos was sure she was going to deck him. Then she re-extended her hand. "What did you say your name was?"

Carlos paused in his fuming, caught off guard. "Carlos," he offered.

"Dorothy," she said, with an unexpected smile that made her suddenly very pretty (if Carlos had swung that way), "I think we have a client."


	2. Down the Rabbit Hole

Three days later, Carlos sat on the empty bed by the window in Cecil's new room. Harriet was paging through the plastic pages of Carlos and Cecil's brain scans for the hundredth time, muttering calculations to herself. Dorothy and Thomas, one of the scientists from Harriet's team who had flown down from Denver for the occasion, went around double checking the equipment they'd set up on two tables on either side of the room.

Some small part of Carlos was beginning to have second thoughts as they arranged the equipment necessary to induce a coma and sync their brainwaves. All he had to do, though, was glance over at the painfully still figure lying on the opposite bed to strengthen his resolve. 

It'd been a nightmare jumping through all the hoops necessary to proceed with the experiment—Carlos had had to sign about a billion waivers that said that he was doing this of his own free will and knew the risks. They'd even had to go over Dr. Greisen's head to the top of the chain of command to get permission to induce the medically-unnecessary coma and to carry out the experiment on hospital grounds.

"You're sure you want to do this?" Harriet asked, looking over the readouts at him.

Carlos nodded. 

"I'm really sorry if this doesn't work," she said. "There's just so much we don't know—what happens if Cecil dies in his dream? If you die? Do you wake up or do you die in real life? And we still don't know what went wrong that killed Marty and Hailey. And the longer you spend in his head, the harder it will be to retrieve you. It's possible he could come out and you'd still be under." 

Carlos nodded; he was familiar with the warnings. He felt that Harriet just needed to say them over and over again, so she wouldn't feel quite so guilty if anything happened. He was very aware that the statistical probability of survival was decidedly against him. If anything, though, it made him want to do it even more. Some part of his mind said that he deserved the high risk, that he should be punished for his good fortune; if Cecil's chance of survival was 10%, then there was no reason his shouldn't be too. The rational part of his brain said that was called survivor's guilt and that this whole venture was idiotic and very dangerous. Whenever that part of his mind chose to speak up, Carlos buried it under thoughts of Cecil, and how much he couldn’t bear to live in a world without him. 

"Dorothy’s right, though; between you being a scientist and the fact that you know Cecil so well—you could hardly ask for a better pair of subjects," Harriet continued. She still sounded nervous.

Carlos smiled wryly. "Live for science, die for science." In his head, he added 'live for Cecil, die for Cecil.'

Dorothy and Thomas finished hooking up the last of the equipment and Thomas ran specs. "All in order," he reported after a moment's time. "Running like a dream...sorry," he added after realizing his own choice of words.

Carlos stood up and walked over to Cecil's bed, tracing his jaw lightly with his fingertips, curling his fingers in Cecil's hair...his fingers trailed down to Cecil's hand. He gripped it. "See you on the other side?" he asked softly. "I'm coming to get you, Cecil. Hold on, I'm coming." He leaned down and kissed him, lightly, on his motionless lips. Carlos remained there for a moment more, then smoothed down a fold in Cecil's shirt and turned back to the neurologist and her team.

"We ready to go?"

"Whenever you are. Make history. Prove the doc wrong, eh?"

Carlos smiled tightly at her, nerves getting the better of him as he lay down, lacing his fingers loosely across his chest.

Dorothy helped Thomas attach some electrodes to Carlos' forehead, and then trailed the wires through a machine and onto electrodes on Cecil's head. Carlos winced as Harriet hooked up the IV.

"Inducing coma in five minutes," Thomas said, clicking something on a laptop plugged into the array.

Carlos stared at the ceiling, one of those white drop panel ceilings with rectangular panels. Harriet stood over him.

"Remember you'll have to try to convince him he's in a dream. Maybe if you really concentrate on that fact as we put you under you'll retain it. Otherwise you'll just have to hope something you can say will snap him out of it."

Carlos nodded, trying to form a picture in his head of this room, hoping it would remind him. 

"And look after yourself. We have no idea what's going on in his head. It could be hell." 

 _Well, that was reassuring,_ Carlos thought to himself.

"And if you die in his head...we don't know what will happen. We think that's what happened to Marty."

Carlos nodded again; he'd heard all this before, but he had a feeling Harriet was starting to get anxious as she sensed failure looming again, the fourth time for her. If this didn't work, not only would he and Cecil die, but Harriet's last chance at realizing her vision would die with them. Carlos had talked with Thomas earlier, and it sounded like Harriet's career might not survive another hit—she was considering dropping out of the field entirely, she felt so guilty about the deaths she had caused.

Carlos smiled up at her, trying to look reassuring. "We'll do our best to get back," he said. "But if this all goes south...it's not your fault. I volunteered; I knew the risks."

"We all did," she said, and he knew she was talking about Marty and Hailey. "That didn't make it any easier."

Carlos gave her a small smile and returned his gaze to the white tile ceiling. He slowed his breathing as best he could, trying to quell his sudden excitement.

"Inducing coma," Thomas said after a pause. "Ready?"

Carlos gave him the thumbs up and folded his hands back across his chest. For a long moment nothing happened, and then he began to feel something, a distant tingling in his toes. He had been told to expect that. They were knocking him out before administering the barbiturate, which would drag him all the way down into the coma. The scientific part of his brain started classifying and documenting the sensation for later analysis.

He abruptly turned his thoughts to Cecil. Science could wait. He had to save Cecil. Had to. Cecil was depending on him. He was a scientist, and he was on a mission to—

That was the last thing Carlos thought before he blacked out.

 

\--------

 

"Locking onto brainwaves," Thomas said, eyes skimming the readouts on the laptop screen, the light reflected on his face and glasses. "Running the algorithm...linking to Cecil's...and he's in."

Dorothy peered over his shoulder at the two graphs Thomas had up in the top half of the screen. The two waves bounced in sync. "If nothing went wrong, he should be through. They should be together."

Harriet remained beside Carlos, looking down at his motionless features. She looked up briefly at his vitals, which had slowed. She glanced at Cecil and his identical vitals. Not for the first time, she wondered what she'd done.

 

\--------

 

Carlos was a scientist, and he was on a mission.

Carlos looked around, startled. All of a sudden, he was somewhere. He blinked. He was standing in the middle of a paved road that stretched ahead of him into a town. The buildings were a little old-fashioned, and widely spaced. It was very warm and dry. Carlos looked over his shoulder. The road stretched out behind him, arrow straight, into a desert. Behind him there were five other people, all staring at him. They wore lab coats over regular clothes, and each held a large cardboard box or clipboard. They stared at him.

"Er," Carlos said, and glanced down at himself. He too was wearing a lab coat—he was, after all, a scientist—and there was a clipboard in his left arm. He looked at it. There were three or four sheets of paper, the top one showing a table of some sort that looked like a printout from a computer. He looked back at the scientists.

They stared at him. "Yes?" Carlos asked at length, when no one seemed forthcoming.

"Are we going?" That was one towards the front, a woman with blonde hair and large earrings.

"Going?" he echoed. It occurred to him that he was very confused. One moment he was—what? Where had he been before here? How did he get here? Who were these people? 

"Yes. Into town," prompted the woman with the earrings, in a tone that said she was doubting his sanity.

Carlos was doubting his sanity too, but he stammered out an "Oh, yes, of course," and turned back towards the town.

Shaking his head a little, he took a few hesitant steps forward, and heard the shuffle of feet behind him. He walked down the road at a balanced pace, looking right and left, still trying to get his bearings. 

A building on his right was boarded up, a large sign on the front saying "closed by the Secret Police." On his other side, a KFC was advertising a $9.99 chicken bucket. At first there was no one around, but the further into town he walked, the more signs of life he saw.

A group of schoolchildren ran past, screeching and throwing sticks at one another. An old woman sat on the porch of her house, rocking back and forth on a squeaking rocking chair, talking with a very tall person with...wings? A helicopter was taking off from behind the post office. Someone with binoculars was crouching inexpertly behind some bushes by a short stone wall. A white man wearing an elaborate Native American headdress ran up to them, threw some seeds in the air, and ran off before Carlos could say anything. None of the scientists behind him said anything.

The buildings continued to fold out in strange patterns—a dark fence surrounding a dog park, a diner, a library—Carlos read the words _Night Vale_ along the top and realized that must be where they were—a bowling alley, a pizza place. 

Carlos stopped. The scientists behind him came to a halt. He turned, and they looked at him expectantly. They were still in the middle of the road, but they had only seen two cars, and both had been parked. Small town.

Again Carlos waited for someone to say something, to offer some tidbit of information, but they were silent and expectant. Carlos got the distinct impression that he was the one in charge here—it was a little odd, as he didn't recognize any of them. 

"Pizza, anyone?" he offered lamely, motioning timidly at the pizza place. 

They all nodded, looking like a bunch of bobble heads, and tramped inside the shop.

Carlos followed, looking up at the bright red and yellow lettering: Big Rico's Pizza. He wasn't honestly sure if he was hungry or not, but it seemed to be midday and maybe he could squeeze some information out of the scientists.

A bell attached to the door by a string dinged when he and his entourage entered. They made a beeline for an unoccupied corner booth and the six of them squeezed in. Carlos took one of the ends. He glanced as casually as he could at the man beside him—he was younger than Carlos, and sported a scarf and boxy plastic-rimmed glasses. There was an ID tag clipped to his lab coat pocket. It read "Nikola Tesla." Carlos stared at it. He had the strongest feeling that that name was familiar to him. He connected it to science in his head, but couldn't get anything else.

A hooded figure approached their table and produced menus.

Carlos thanked him, and everyone started scanning the menu. It seemed like a pretty typical selection to Carlos, and he picked out a calzone. The others decided to split two pizzas.

The hooded figure returned, took their order without writing anything down, and drifted away.

Carlos, with a sudden moment of intuition, excused himself to go to the bathroom. 

Once locating the facility, he locked himself in and, resting his palms on the edge of the sink, stared into the mirror. 

He looked like himself—how he knew that he didn't know, he couldn't even remember his own last name. His own last name. Carlos ripped the ID tag off his lab coat and looked at it. "Carlos" it read. It did not list a last name. Carlos frowned. There was a barcode on the ID, and a picture of him, and the word "scientist." Carlos squinted at the smaller font by the barcode but, upon closer inspection, it turned out not to be words at all, just artistic scribbles that resembled words from a distance. Baffled, Carlos clipped the ID back on.

He patted himself down, looking for clues as to his identity. All his pockets were empty except for a pen and folded piece of notebook paper in his breast pocket. He unfolded the paper. It was blank. He uncapped the pen and inspected it. He scribbled on the back of his hand. It worked. Underneath the lab coat he was wearing a red plaid button down shirt and jeans. He checked his shoe size. It was exactly what he expected it to be. He didn't know how he knew what his shoe size was when he couldn't even remember his own last name, but the number seemed familiar and associated with shoes in his head.

Well, what _did_ he know, then? He was a scientist. Leaning against the sink, half to convince himself that it was real, he stared at his reflection again. Scientist. Science. Okay. Science. He recalled half a dozen equations, mostly about projectile motion, inertia, relativ—relativity? Was that it? He squinted at himself. Who had done that? Elbert? Eggland? Alberta? He rubbed the bridge of his nose. Why couldn't he remember?

After another moment of staring at himself and wondering if he was losing his mind, he left the bathroom and returned to what he was now beginning to think of as his team of scientists.

He sat down and looked at each of them in turn. "How long have we worked together now?" he asked in the most conversational tone he could muster.

For a moment they looked at each other, and then one of the women offered, "Just a week or two."

"How about we get to know each other, then, while we're waiting," Carlos suggested with a broad grin.

They took turns around the table.

Nikola with his boxy glasses said he was a scientist interested in science and he was new.

Carlos gave him a sideways glance, half wondering if he was joking. He did not look like it. 

Then a scrawny youth with long locks named Isaac Newton said he had been interested in science since his childhood, and his favorite food was apples. Or black walnuts. He wasn't sure which.

The woman who'd spoken outside was next. "Shroe Dinger," she introduced herself. 

"First name?" Carlos asked. 

She looked confused. "Shroe." 

"You first name is Shroe?" 

"Yes. I like cats. And science of course." Carlos let it slide.

Next was a man with elaborately dyed blue and silver hair. "Nicholas Copernicus," he introduced himself. 

"Wait. Nicholas—Nikola?" He gestured at Tesla. "Doesn't that get confusing?" 

Nicholas thought for a moment. "You're right. My name's George."

"What?"

"My name's George Copernicus. Glad to meet you all. I like science." 

Carlos opened his mouth, but nothing came out. No one else batted an eye. 

Nicholas-now-George smiled in a satisfied way and turned to the woman on the other end, a rounder woman with a wide, kind smile. "Albert Einstein." 

Carlos' eyebrows shot up. "Your name is Albert?" 

"Yes." She smiled, in that same highly satisfied way that George-previously-Nicholas had just a moment before. "Lovely name, I always thought. I'm a very accomplished scientist."

"Really?" Carlos said, his interest piqued. "What have you worked on?"

She looked a little flustered for a moment. "Um...I do lots of experiments and work hard and write lots of stuff down. Oh! And math. I do lots of math. I love science."

Carlos wanted to pressure her for more specific details, but Nikola quickly switched the topic to the pizza, which suddenly arrived. They all had lots of input on the pizza. 

One calzone later, Carlos was staring idly out the window. The conversation, despite having already consumed ten minutes, was still on the pizza. Granted, the calzone had been good, but not _that_ good.

He went over his situation again. He was a scientist. Whatever had happened to his memory, one did not simply show up in a town—Night Vale, was it?—with a team of scientists and not have been planning to do science when he got there. 

Carlos leaned over to one of the boxes his team had carried in and stacked by the booth. He opened the top one. The scientists immediately ceased their praise of the pizza and looked at him.

"Just...checking the equipment," Carlos said, a little defensively. They stared at him. "Is that okay with you?"

"Sure," said Nikola after a moment, and they all returned to talking about the pizza as though nothing had happened.

He wasn't sure what he was expecting when he opened the box.

He reached in and pulled out a microscope and set it on the table. He fiddled with the focus knob, but it didn't move. He looked closer. It certainly _looked_ like a microscope, but it felt like it was made of resin. It was too light, and looked like it had been cast from a mold, like it was one solid immovable piece, not smooth and glossy, with carefully turning wheels, delicate slides...Carlos blinked.

He lifted the microscope to return it to the box and all of a sudden it was heavier than before. Its surface was smooth and glossy. Baffled, Carlos returned it to the tabletop and spun the focus knob. It focused, like a microscope ought to. Carlos, wondering if he was having a serious mental breakdown, quickly returned it to the box. It got stuck on something. Looking in, Carlos saw a small cardboard box he was almost certain had not been there before. He pulled it out and opened it. It was full of little glass slides.

Feeling like he'd missed a trick, he glanced over at the scientists. They were all staring at him. He expected one of them to yell that he'd been punk’d, but they seemed perfectly serious.

"Shall we go?" asked Carlos after a moment.

They all nodded and slid out of the booth after him, each collecting his or her box or clipboard. 

Carlos went to pay at the counter, only to realize he didn't have a wallet—after all, he had just patted himself down in the bathroom, and all his pockets were empty.

The hooded figure saw him feeling around guiltily for a wallet.

All of a sudden a weight dropped into Carlos' back jeans pocket. He pulled out a worn black leather wallet.

The hooded figure waited silently. 

Baffled yet again, Carlos opened his wallet, wondering what he would find. There was a row of credit cards, a driver's license (both of which he resolved to take a closer look at later), and a wad of cash.

Carlos, trying to cover up his perplexment, quickly handed over the appropriate bills, told the hooded figure to keep the change, and hurried out of the building as quickly as he could.

Carlos paused outside Big Rico's to take a couple deep breaths, hoping the fresh air would clear his mind and make sense of all this. It didn't. Carlos' gaze fell on the building across the street from the pizza place. Curious, he went up closer, looking at the "space available for rent" sign in the window. His team followed him.

"We're scientists," Carlos said after a moment. He ran through it in his head. He had no idea who he was, or why he was here, but he knew he was a scientist, and if he was going to stay here for any length of time, he ought to have some lab space. Already there were strange things happening—the wallet appearing in his pocket, the microscope gaining weight, the inability of his fellow scientists to utter a single scientific word apart from "science"—something was going on here, and he ought to get some readings. It was the only reason he could come up with that he had come here in the first place.

"We need lab space," he announced to the group. 

The scientists behind him nodded in agreement and followed Carlos as he led them into the building. 

The space they picked out was perfect: brightly lit, wide, and with plenty of windows for venting air in case something went wrong (read: exploded). The man Carlos rented it from was stick thin and bald, and seemed to barely register what Carlos was saying. He was adamant, however, that this was the best and only space in town to rent, and was the cheapest and best located.

Carlos produced the necessary funds for the first months' rent from his now-very-thick wallet, and was about to retrieve more for the security deposit, but the man waved it away. "All I need is the rent," he said in a voice as unremarkable as a tuna sandwich. Carlos asked him about the lease, but again the man waved it off. "No lease. Just pay me every month." He said Carlos could move in immediately.

Carlos thought this was odd, but was not about to argue.

Carlos sent one of the scientists—Newton, he thought—to go buy some tables and various equipment. Carlos made a list. As he scribbled down what he needed, it occurred to him that a lot of this stuff would probably have to be ordered online; Night Vale was a small town, after all. He remembered the wallet, and how it had seemingly appeared out of nowhere when he needed it. Just as an experiment, Carlos scribbled down "5 oz. pure terrilium." Satisfied with his cunning, he handed the list to Newton. On second thought, he sent Copernicus with too, with instructions to set up some long distance seismographic monitoring stations (Carlos had pulled the equipment out of one on the boxes while looking for a pad of paper). The sooner they could start getting readings, Carlos figured, the better. Newton asked about some of the items on the list, and Carlos described them to him, even though a lot of them Newton ought to have known about from college. When he asked about the terrilium, Carlos said it was an element and looked like grayish green rock with flecks of amber. Newton nodded with the same acceptance he had shown the other items, and left with Copernicus. 

Next he instructed the others to start unpacking the boxes. Carlos opened the microscope one and hauled it, along with the slides and a second microscope, out of the box.

Tesla opened a box and handed something from inside over to Carlos.

Carlos stared at it. It was a metal box about the size of his hand, covered in wires and switches and little knobs. A couple lights blinked at him.

"What _is_ this?" Carlos asked, turning it over in his hands.

"Scientific equipment," Tesla replied easily. 

Carlos shot him a glance and put it in a separate pile.

Next Carlos unpacked a seismograph from the box that had held the monitoring station equipment. Einstein opened her box, and it was full of rocks. They were mostly gray, but a few were bright orange or purple. A couple shimmered. Carlos put the shimmery rocks in the pile with the metal box. 

Carlos removed a Bunsen burner next, and Einstein opened a box full of carefully packed flasks and beakers. Carlos found a Geiger counter and something he felt certain was a multi-channel analyzer. He spent some time puzzling over why some things, like the name of the handheld device, came to him so suddenly while others, like his last name, eluded him.

"What's that?" asked Shroe, looking over his shoulder. 

"Hmm? Oh, a multi-channel analyzer—MCA for short—a sort of suped-up Geiger counter—didn't you know?"

"Of course," she replied, but continued to stare at him expectantly. 

"It measures radiation," Carlos explained patiently. "It senses alpha and beta particles—that's background radiation—and makes little popping noises as they pass through. Here." He turned it on and slid a switch.

The air erupted in a cacophony of popping noises, like someone popping twenty bags of popcorn all at once. 

"Whoa!" shouted Carlos, quickly snapping the machine off. He looked at the back of his hand, half expecting to see the skin peeling away, and then tested the MCA again.

"What is it?" Shroe asked innocently.

"There should be a pop or two every couple of seconds—the radiation levels in here must be off the charts!"

Shroe shrugged, evidently unfamiliar with the deadly consequences of that level of radiation.

Carlos ran the MCA through a diagnostic check. It beeped at him and the display read that it was working perfectly. He got it running and set it up to silently record all the radiation in the room and divide it into the alpha, beta, and gamma types. The preliminary results weren't good. Alpha and beta radiation were largely harmless, but the levels here were much higher than they ought to be. And the gamma radiation reading was frighteningly high—gamma radiation was the stuff you didn't want to mess with. With those levels of radiation, what else could be happening in this town? Runaway mutations? Advanced cellular degeneration? 

Carlos ran a hand through his hair, dimly registering that it was getting rather long. He should get it cut. Something in the back of his mind thought he shouldn't, and he paused, one hand still wrapped in his hair. The way this thought had presented itself had a different texture than the others...There was a reason he hadn't gotten a haircut before, he felt sure...someone liked his hair this way, someone whose opinion Carlos cared about very deeply....the moment passed and Carlos shrugged it off and went about setting up the seismograph.

Forty minutes later Copernicus and Newton returned with the tables and equipment and started setting them up. 

"Whoa, whoa," said Carlos, staring at Copernicus. "Didn't you have blue hair before?" The man's hair was now bright red, streaked with gold.

Copernicus looked at him long and hard for a couple unbroken seconds, then shook his head decisively. "No, it's always been red."

"Are you sure?" Carlos asked, incredulous. He would have staked his life on it.

Copernicus nodded energetically. "My hair has always been red. You must be mistaken." 

Carlos didn't believe him, but took one of the brown paper bags from him nonetheless.

He put it on one of the newly assembled tables and started pulling the contents out:  batteries, chemicals, wire...and a lump of grayish green rock flecked with amber. Carlos held it up. "What's this?"

Isaac glanced over. "Terrilium, like you said." 

Carlos turned it over in his hands. "Where'd you find it?" he asked, keeping his voice carefully controlled.

Isaac shrugged. "Same place as the iodine. I asked, he provided."

Carlos stared at it, trying to hide his excitement. There was no such thing as terrilium. Yet here it was. Carlos wondered if Isaac had simply found a rock matching Carlos' description, or if the man at the chemicals store was having a joke, or if there _was_ maybe something else at work here. Carlos resolved to test the rock later and see what it was made of. Maybe it was just iron and copper; you never knew. _I should send him for a perpetual motion machine,_ Carlos thought. _And a book reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity._

Carlos set the rock aside for later experimentation and pulled out the other miscellanea from the bag: some food, graph paper, paper towels...no pencils?

"They're banned by the City Council," Isaac explained. He didn't seem the least bit surprised. Carlos' eyebrows shot up.

"They banned _pencils?"_ he repeated, just in case he hadn't heard right.

"Pens, too. All writing utensils," George-previously-Nicholas added. "But we got a mini fridge!" He beamed. "And I bought a radio!"

 

\--------

 

After about an hour, Carlos had set up everything he could was standing around, supervising Shroe and Nikola cleaning beakers. They might not know much about actual science, but they were certainly eager to help, and seemed capable of at least simple tasks. 

Carlos went around and checked the preliminary readouts. He froze when he reached the seismograph. The needle was a blur, spiking from end to end, drawing a massive wave across the page, _zig zag zig zag zig zag._ Carlos grabbed the paper, which rustled noisily in his hands.

"This is impossible!" he cried, taking in the data. When he'd left it, it had been reading small waves, little tiny seismic shifts. Now it was spiking like they were in the middle of the San Andreas Fault and it was 1906. Carlos dropped the paper and went to reconfigure the sensors, certain there must be some mechanical error, but the readout didn't change. The needle kept spiking back and forth, whipping left and right as though trying to shake the machine apart.

Carlos ran to the window and looked out. The street was calm. A few birds wheeled in the sky. He ran back to the machine. According to this, there were massive earthquakes hitting every two minutes—even as he watched, the needle spiked high, but there was no discernible movement of the earth. He unplugged the seismograph and reconfigured the entire thing, resetting it until he felt certain it would work properly. For a few seconds he thought he'd fixed it, but then the needle swung in up a wide arc and Carlos threw his hands up.

"We need to go check the sensors for this thing," Carlos announced.

The scientists looked up.

"Make sure the readings aren't faulty on the seismograph."

The scientists nodded.

"Where'd you set them up?" Carlos asked.

"By Route 800," George-previously-Nicholas said. 

"Let's go." Carlos grabbed the MCA and led the way outside. Maybe he could get some better readings elsewhere. He also grabbed a thermal scanner—heat vision. Massive amounts of radiation should give off massive amounts of heat when the particles ionized, so between that and the MCA-Geiger counter, he should be able to pinpoint the location of the radiation. Maybe there was an old nuclear power plant that had sprung a leak, or something more sinister.

Carlos gestured for Copernicus to take the lead, and he took them on a winding path through the streets, making turns and detours as easily as if he'd lived here all his life. There was an Arby's, and a Ralph's, and what looked like a waterfront, complete with boardwalk...except there was no water. A group of citizens clustered around it, some hooded in dark cloaks, others normal looking. A tall...creature...with large wings and a grotesquely deformed face floated past. Carlos' head turned all the way around to follow it with his eyes, but none of the other scientists seemed fazed in the slightest.

Carlos scanned the streets and buildings with, in turn, the MCA (which had settled down to a moderate rate of radiation, the type that would only kill you slowly in a month or two) and the thermal scanner.

They were walking past a row of houses beyond the elementary school when all of a sudden Carlos stopped. The team of scientists halted, briefly swaying forward with their momentum. They clustered around him as if on cue.

Carlos looked down at the thermal scanner display, then up at the house in front of him. He turned the scanner towards the house on the left, and a similar image appeared on the scanner screen, all cool blues and greens. He turned it to the house on the right and got the same result. He pointed it towards the house in front of him. The sonar screen was blank, a black house-shaped outline, registering no heat whatsoever.

Carlos handed the device to one of the other scientists—Shroe, he thought—and bent down to pick up a rock from the edge of the road. He very gently tossed the rock towards the house. It disappeared. Carlos frowned, uncertain of whether the rock had passed _through_ the house, like it had appeared to, or simply dropped soundlessly into the grass. Carlos picked up a second rock and threw it a little higher than the previous one. This one dinged off the siding. Carlos took a step to the left, and then several to the right.

He looked back at the scanner and back at the house. It certainly _seemed_ to be there—after all, the houses on either side registered on the scanner, and this house was identical.

All of a sudden, the house shimmered. It was as though it were a TV screen, suddenly wavering and going transparent in places. Then it was back.

"Does that...did anyone else see that?" Carlos demanded.

They made murmurs of assent.

"Does that house...does it even _exist_?" Carlos said. This town was the most bizarre place he had ever been—flickering houses, off the chart radiation levels, insane earthquakes, winged creatures, magically appearing wallets—as a person, he ought to be terrified. As a scientist, he was fascinated. No one got to study stuff like this. No one. 

Carlos made a mental note to add the house to the list of phenomenon he was planning on looking into, and told Copernicus to continue on to Route 800. 

Once there, Carlos could find nothing wrong with the earthquake sensors and reluctantly replaced them, scratching his head.

The town should have shaken itself to pieces with readings like this, but it hadn't. However, Carlos reminded himself, that didn't mean it still wouldn't. He should tell everyone, warn them. They probably hadn't had a scientist here before, might not know the danger they were in...

"Is there some way we can get word out to the citizens?" Carlos asked. "Some way we can get everyone together?"

"Like a town meeting?" Einstein asked. 

"Yeah."

"I'll set one up!" Tesla offered, and dashed off before Carlos could call him back. It was still early, maybe there _was_ some obscure fault in the equipment...

Before he knew it, Shroe had dragged him off to City Hall, an imposing white stone building complete with pillars and a dome. Carlos thought it was a bit extravagant for a small town in the middle of a desert, but, again, no one else raised an eyebrow. 

Half an hour later Carlos found himself standing off to the side of a mid-sized crowd of people, some appearing to be reporters, others clearly citizens. A short elderly woman offered him a corn muffin. He accepted, and she smiled widely. She reached up and pinched his cheek. 

"Aren't you a good boy?" she asked, and then sighed dramatically and continued handing out corn muffins. 

Carlos, a bit perturbed, rubbed his cheek and took a bite of the corn muffin. It could've used some salt.

Once everyone had assembled, Carlos awkwardly climbed up to the podium (complete with Night Vale's City Seal) and took a moment to stand there looking out over the crowd. The reporters huddled in the front, citizens clustered behind them. He spotted a few of the winged creatures, the hooded figures, and some people wearing Sheriff's uniforms. Off to the side was a van painted purple and black and white with the letters NVCR on the side and a broadcasting antenna emerging from the roof. He distantly remembered that one of the scientists had bought a radio, and resolved to listen to the show later to get the feel of the town and how weird they thought themselves. In the back there was a row of unmarked black SUVs and a row of men and women in black suits with black fedoras and sunglasses, hands folded in front of them.

Carlos gripped the edge of the podium and, despite the terrifying winged creatures and the black hooded figures and the vague yet menacing figures in the back row, he felt a sudden rush of exhilaration.

He was a scientist, and he was on a mission. Surely his mission had been to study this place? There was no other reason he could have come—none whatsoever.

Carlos grinned, suddenly feeling like everything had finally slotted into place, that he had figured it all out. "Hello, Night Vale!" he said. "My name is Carlos, and I am a scientist. Night Vale has got to be the most scientifically interesting community I have ever seen, and I'm here to study exactly what's been going on around here.

"First, we have discovered that there a house, back behind the elementary school, that doesn't appear to exist.

"It seems like it exists," Carlos continued, "Like it’s just right there when you look at it. And it’s between two other identical houses, so it would make more sense for it to be there than not. But we ran tests, and it's definitely not there. It sort of flickers sometimes.

"Also, we set up a station on Route 800 monitoring seismological shifts, and we've checked and double-checked the equipment, but we're getting readings of very intense activity. That is to say, there should be massive earthquakes happening every minute or so. We will of course triple-check our instruments, and investigate each phenomenon further, but those are our preliminary findings, so...be aware." 

Carlos stood awkwardly at the podium for a moment, the crowd still staring up expectantly at him, unfazed by his news. "Thank you," Carlos added after a long moment, and stepped down from the podium. The crowd started dispersing and talking amongst themselves.

Carlos ran a hand through his hair, again noting its length. He gestured to his scientists, and they gathered around him. 

"Okay, you three—Shroe, Isaac... _George_ —go back to that house behind the elementary school—here, take the scanner—and try to get some readings, okay? Run some tests."

"What kind of tests?" Isaac asked, and Carlos reminded himself that they weren't _actually_ scientists. He had no idea what exactly they _actually_ were, but scientist was certainly not it.

"Get some readings on the scanner, see if everyone else can see it, keep track of how often it flickers...I don't know—go ring the doorbell if you have to!" He waved them off, and they turned and left as bid.

"You two, with me. We're going to try to track down the source of this radiation."

The remaining scientists trailed behind Carlos obediently as he started off away from the crowd, MCA in hand.

Carlos glanced at his watch—and stopped. He raised it to eye level. He thought back. He didn't remember having had a watch before. He tapped its surface, half expecting it to dissolve under his finger, but it rang like glass ought to and he shook his suspicions away.

On second thought, maybe he ought to write his suspicions down. Maybe all these little things were connected. He reached for the pen in his pocket, then paused and glanced around. If pens really had been outlawed by the City Council, maybe he'd better tread lightly, at least for a few days.

He made a crisscrossing pattern through the streets, watching for radiation spikes, trying to ascertain the center of the fluctuations.

Carlos was halfway between two brick buildings, down a narrow alley, when all of a sudden it got darker. It was already pretty dark, being in an alley, but it darkened very suddenly. Carlos hurried to the end of the alleyway, but it was just as dark in the street. There was an orange- purple glow on the western horizon. There was a flurry of footsteps behind him and he spun around, but it was only Albert and Nikola.

"What?" Nikola asked, seeing Carlos' alarmed expression.

"Nothing, um...what time do you have?" He looked at his watch. 

Nikola and Albert each checked their own watches—identical black-banded ones with plain round faces. 

Their three numbers matched. "What day is it?" Carlos quizzed them next.

Albert seemed to space out for a moment, and then replied, "October 15th."

"October..." Carlos said, scratching at his ear in thought. He tugged out his pen, observing the surprised looks of the scientists. "I know they're banned, but I need it to do some calculations. You can't do science without writing stuff down, you know."

This answer seemed to satisfy them, and as Carlos pulled the blank piece of paper from his pocket and plastered it to a nearby wall with his hand, he wondered for the first time if the group of scientists wasn't here to help him. Maybe they were spies. Or secret agents.

He worried over that in the back of his head while he scratched out the appropriate calculations on the paper, scrawling in the time, time of year, latitude, and longitude (the latter two which Nikola supplied with surprising ease). He rounded to the nearest second, and then scratched his chin with the end of the pen.

"Hmmm," he said.

"What have you discovered?" asked Einstein, peering over at his messy calculations.

"It would appear that, for this time and location, the sun should be setting ten minutes from now." 

"So...the sun set early?" asked Nikola.

"It would appear so," Carlos mused. This got stranger and stranger.

"Huh," Nikola said. "I'll go tell everyone!" He started to dash off but Carlos called him back.

"Wait! Here—take…Albert,"—he still found her name bizarre— "and go find all the clocks you can, from all around town. See what you can find out."

Nikola nodded enthusiastically and he and Albert sprinted off.

Shaking his head, Carlos stared down at the piece of paper. How had he known the correct equation for sundown? It was not, he felt certain, something a lot of people knew off the top of their head. And how had Nikola known the correct latitude and longitude for a town he had only just stepped foot into? It just didn't make any sense. 

And then there was the question of his memory, and the scientists. Perhaps he had been kidnapped, possibly from a top secret government project, and spirited away. Maybe the scientists were here to observe _him_ ; maybe he'd been abducted by aliens, and this was their attempt to recreate human civilization—he stopped. He didn't know why he was here or how he'd gotten here, but he felt certain that he'd come of his own free will. That stood out strongly in his mind, though he could not recall a more specific memory.

But there was more than that—Carlos sifted through his feelings, searching for the general impressions that rang true, not worrying about the specifics quite yet. Someone needed him. Someone was depending on him, on the success of this mission. Life and death hung in the balance, he felt certain; there was a weight to that thought, a dark weight of anxiety.

But a scientist should trust his instincts, and his instincts told him he was here on a mission. What sort of mission, he wasn't sure, but what could it be beyond explaining this town? Maybe if he could puzzle it out, take enough readings and deduce the source of the weirdness, he would be pulled out, or word would be sent, or his job would otherwise be done. That had to be his first priority, then: figuring out exactly _what_ was going on here, in this...Night Vale.

He stowed away the illegal pen before anyone could walk by. He returned the paper to his pocket, too, and decided he'd have to satisfy himself with finding the source of the radiation first.

 

\--------

 

After about half an hour by his watch, Carlos was getting excited and a little worried. The MCA was indicating he was getting very close to the source of the radiation now, and the meter was reading spikes of gamma radiation into the red zone every few seconds.

He had tracked it to the Night Vale Community Radio station, a modest dark brick building with a broadcasting tower on the roof. He circled it, once, the MCA in hand, and the readings seemed to indicate the source was somewhere inside the building. He hesitated before entering; surely that amount of radiation would be deadly? Then he shrugged it off with the thought that he was probably dead already from the radiation he'd already been exposed to, and what was a little more? 

He knocked on the door and was led inside by a sandy-haired intern. His cheeks and eyes were red from crying. 

"What's the matter?" Carlos asked as kindly as he could, trying to ignore his excitement at the jump in the radiation meter as the door opened. 

"Intern Cassandra died yesterday. She worked here." 

"My condolences," Carlos said, feeling distinctly guilty for not being more sincere. He tore his gaze from the MCA and adopted his most solemn expression. "Was it sudden?"

The boy nodded and sniffed. "Eaten by a whale in the high school gymnasium. Not the worst way to go, I suppose." 

Carlos was taken aback, but the boy merely gestured down the hallway.

"Studio's that way, lounge is over there, bathrooms in the middle, station management in the back. Don't go back there." 

Carlos caught onto his intense look and nodded sagely, though he had no idea what the problem was. Maybe they didn't like visitors? 

"We're on the air right now, but it's the weather, so you can go in if you want." He gestured to the studio door, and the bright green On Air sign hanging above it.

"Thanks," Carlos said, looking down at the radiation meter. He did a 360 turn, and the MCA buzzed insistently at the studio door. He nodded briskly to the intern, who put his head down and shuffled off, and approached the door.

He peered through the frosted glass, then knocked softly and opened the door with a faint click.

The room was on the small side, a desk in the middle overflowing with papers and miscellanea. A broad window took up the wall facing out onto the street, the reverse letters NVCR painted onto it. A long bank of switches and controls wrapped around the room under the microphones hanging from the ceiling. In the center of the room, facing away from Carlos, a man sat in a chair shuffling some papers. His hair was light, and the slope of his shoulders eerily familiar. He wore a pair of oversized headphones, but had moved one of the pads back so he could hear with one ear. He was humming quietly to himself. 

"Hello?" Carlos asked quietly, the device in his hand buzzing insistently.

The man turned in his chair and looked up, one hand half reached to adjust his headphones. 

Carlos froze and almost dropped the MCA. His stomach did a backflip. It was Cecil. 

Immediately he backtracked his thoughts—who was Cecil? He didn't know this man, surely; they'd just met, after all. Some part of Carlos thought to himself that Cecil was rather hot, but Carlos squelched that part immediately.

"Carlos?" squeaked the man, who Carlos hastily reminded himself was probably _not_ named Cecil. 

Not-Cecil quickly composed himself, knocking the other side of the headphones off so they hung around his neck in a thoroughly endearing— _where were these thoughts coming from?_

"Ah, Carlos," Not-Cecil remarked again, this time in a more controlled manner. "The scientist." His face was carefully blank.

Carlos grappled with his emotions and managed a terse nod. He was having trouble tearing his gaze from the radio host. There was just _something_ about him, some nagging feeling in the back of Carlos' skull and in the hammering of his heart in his chest. A million bells were ringing in Carlos' mind that said he ought to do something, anything, but Carlos had no idea what. And on top of it all, he felt inexplicably... _happy_. Happier than he’d felt in a long time, he felt sure, but the more Carlos tried to pinpoint the source the more elusive it became.

The cries of the MCA were what finally dragged Carlos' attention back to what he was doing.

“Um, hi,” managed Carlos. He stared intently at the radiation meter, not trusting himself to be able to look away if he glanced at the radio host again. “Just...testing the place, if that’s all right with you.”

“Sure,” Not-Cecil said, and there was a bit of an awkward silence as Carlos shuffled around the room, pointing the MCA at nothing in particular. He could feel the radio host’s eyes hot on his back, and prayed he couldn’t hear the rapid beating of Carlos’ heart.

His circle of the room inevitably moved him closer to where Not-Cecil was sitting. He got as close as he dared, then cleared his throat uncertainly. 

“What did you say you were testing for, again?” Not-Cecil asked, his voice smooth and perfect. 

“Um...materials,” Carlos replied vaguely, not wanting to mention the words “deadly radioactivity” in case it caused mass panic. He was about to switch to the other side of the room, after which he could make a quick escape, when the MCA suddenly lit up in a cacophony of sound. The dial swung up into the high red “danger” zone and stayed there. Carlos’ attention was immediately arrested, and he pushed forward, identifying the main microphone as the source of the radiation.

Carlos stared at the reading, but it remained on the highest level. Carlos frowned. That level of radioactivity...he ought to be dead. They all ought to be dead. Cecil—

Only a second later he realized that he was leaning over Cecil—no, Not-Cecil—and was close enough to hear the other man’s breathing. 

“Sorry,” Carlos said hastily, retracting his arm. “You should, um, evacuate the building,” he offered, carefully looking anywhere other than the radio host as he rushed for the door.

“Do you want to…stay for an interview?” Cecil asked, sounding hopeful. 

“No, no, sorry, I can’t,” Carlos stammered, fumbling with the doorknob. His collar was feeling very hot. “I should—I need to go.” He managed to get a grip on the doorknob and half fell through the door as it opened in his haste to escape. The MCA was still going nuts. 

He made it a few steps closer to the station door when the intern from earlier wandered up. 

“Hey,” Carlos said, bringing him to a halt. “Who was that? Who does the broadcasts here?” 

“Cecil,” the intern said. “Cecil Palmer. He’s the Voice of Night Vale. Don’t you listen to the radio?” 

Cecil. His name _was_ Cecil. How on earth had Carlos known that?

“I, um, definitely will be listening in the future, thanks,” Carlos stammered after a moment, realizing the intern was evidently waiting for an answer. He pushed through the door to the outside of the building and made it several streets over before he found a deserted alleyway and leaned against one of the walls. He slid down until he was sitting on the ground, clutching the gently beeping MCA.

This was impossible. His heart was still hammering, and there was far too much adrenaline in his system. He took deep breaths. He was a scientist. He was logical. He had to look at this logically. He waited, breathing evenly until he felt himself calm down. It was cool and dark in the twilight.

Was it entirely impossible that he hadn’t met Cecil before? Even his name sounded familiar, easy on his tongue: Cecil Palmer. And his face—he could recall his face, every line of it, as though he’d spent years studying it, whereas he could barely remember the names of the scientists he’d newly acquired.

It was possible, he supposed, that he’d known him before he’d lost his memory. Perhaps they had been friends. The idea seemed very pleasant to Carlos. He shook the feeling off. It didn’t matter what he felt or thought he felt or thought he might have felt—he was on a mission after all, a mission to study Night Vale. Someone was depending on him, someone he must care about very much. If he had come here voluntarily...it was entirely possible he’d known his memory would be wiped. But he came anyway. So what would memory-Carlos expect him to do now? He didn’t know, but he was a scientist, so doing science seemed the obvious course. Presumably that would help him save whomever it was who needed saving. He must be qualified, he figured, or they would have sent someone else. Either way, he couldn't afford to get distracted from his mission.

So, science it was.

 

\--------

 

The days passed in a blur. The weirdness of Night Vale slowly became less weird as Carlos detected trends in the data and certain consistent anomalies. He came to understand that some things, such as hooded figures, impossible City Council decrees, and extra-ordinary amounts and variations of violence were commonplace. And some things, like angels, mountains, and the moon, didn’t exist, and that still other things, like the Sheriff’s Secret Police, helicopters, and vague yet menacing government agencies, were in fact beneficial. It was almost a relief when the occasional crisis did occur, just to see how they would react.

The Glow Cloud was a personal favorite of Carlos’ (and its sudden return as a member of the school board was inspired), but the tragedy at the Public Library was just a shame. The sudden transfiguration of all the wheat and wheat by-products in the town into poisonous snakes was frankly horrifying, and Carlos almost packed up and left town then, but he reflected on the fact that he had nowhere else to go and wasn't this the most scientifically interesting thing yet?, and instead resigned himself to sticking around long enough to complete his scientific mission, even if it felt like he was shackling himself to his own coffin.

He got his hair cut and discovered, quite to his bemusement, that books had stopped working. (Carlos figured that out by plucking a book from a shelf in the lobby of City Hall where he was applying for a permit to use pens, only to discover that the words were just amateurish scribbles, much like the ones on Carlos' ID badge. He was closely inspecting this when the book exploded in a shower of sparks. Carlos hastily tried to drop it, but it clamped itself shut around his hand. Against all probability (which meant it was perfectly ordinary in Night Vale) it seemed to be sinking little sharp paper teeth into his hand. There was a sudden smell like someone cooking and Carlos' hand began to get uncomfortably hot. He slammed his hand against the wall repeatedly, until the book shook loose and fell to the floor with a hiss and a thump. It lay innocently on the ground, a thick green gas seeping from between the pages. Carlos inspected his hand, but it seemed to be mostly in one piece. He glared victoriously at the book, which suddenly twisted and seemed to look up at him. As if on cue, all the other books on the bookshelf started vibrating, and then abruptly threw themselves off the shelf, bouncing along the ground and opening and closing themselves threateningly in Carlos' direction. Carlos decided there was no harm in running from an enemy too large to overcome, and ran as fast as his feet would carry him in the opposite direction. It took five streets and the intervention of the angels living at Old Woman Josie's before he shook the rest of them off.)

Then there was the creeping fear that paralyzed Carlos and everyone else in Night Vale for several minutes. That had been simply awful; first it was an anxiety, like he had forgotten to turn the Bunsen burners off at the lab, then it was a certainty that he was not going to be able to complete his mission to study Night Vale, then the absolute certainty that someone was going to die without him, and someone needed his help, someone whom Carlos could not help, and a gut-wrenching fear like nothing he had ever experienced...

Then there were the strange lights in Radon Canyon, the mysterious pyramid which appeared overnight spouting philosophy, the feral dogs roaming the streets that the City Council claimed to be plastic bags, and the race for mayor between Hiram McDaniels, Literally a Five-Headed Dragon, and the Faceless Old Woman who Secretly Lives in Your Home. And then there was the Man in the Tan Jacket and the ongoing investigation of the tiny underground city under Lane 5 at the bowling alley. Then the terror that was Street Cleaning Day, and then Valentine's Day, and then the freaky sandstorm where everyone got doppelgängers...everyone except him...

He continued to work with his team of scientists, and they never revealed themselves to be anything other than helpful and eager assistants. Some of the readings he was getting, though, were certainly impossible: he did gravitational readings once, and instead of being a straight line, the graph came out as a sort of elaborate curlicue. It wasn't even a mathematical function! How those numbers were even produced by the equipment, he had no idea, but quite regularly his equipment would register impossible readings that would fluctuate wildly from day to day. He could find no fault with any of the hardware. It was as though the laws of physics here had been invented on the fly by someone with absolutely no concept of what the laws of physics were _supposed_ to look like.

And through it all he listened to the radio.

It was oddly comforting, listening to the silky voice outlining that week's dangers and warnings, making sense of the chaos. It wasn't always easy; it hadn't even been a week (had it been a week? Longer? Time was a slippery thing in Night Vale—he knew Cecil's shows aired every two weeks, but sometimes it felt like the two weeks in between passed in a blur of monotony in which absolutely nothing of importance happened. Carlos convinced himself that this was a real effect, and not just his mind ignoring the days Cecil wasn't a part of) before the terrifying change of tone on the radio. One minute everything was fine, something about station management, and the next there were horrifying sounds emanating from the radio, awful squelchings and rumblings and then Cecil's voice, higher than usual, and quieter, and breathier, as though he were holding the microphone too close. And then he said that station management was in the recording booth, and Carlos could barely understand what he was talking about, but he sounded terrified, and said he was hiding under his desk, and that he was going to try to make a run for it and good-bye. And then the transmission stopped. And only then Carlos realized that he was frozen, rooted to the spot and staring at the radio, a beaker clutched in his hand. And he had a sudden urge to sprint as fast as he could all the way across town to the radio station to make sure Cecil was all right, that he would be okay—for a few moments he was certain it was the creeping fear again.

And then he stopped himself. Took a few deep breaths and set the beaker down. It did not matter what happened to the man on the radio. Carlos was a scientist. He had to focus on his work. It would be unfortunate if the man on the radio died, he supposed, but lots of unfortunate things happened in Night Vale, and it would be best if he kept to himself. Just get the job done. People depended on him. 

He wasn't oblivious to the attention Cecil lavished on him on air, though. The part of Carlos that was a scientist on a mission found it very distracting and more than a little obsessive, but the other part of Carlos, the part Carlos tried to hide very much whenever he got within fifty feet of the radio station, thought it was adorable and hugely flattering and made Carlos blush whenever Cecil mentioned him.

He kept his visits to the station purely professional, though. Trips to drop off news he wanted Cecil to broadcast, little things that he always lingered a little too long on the threshold before delivering. Cecil had given Carlos his number very early on, but Scientist-on-a-Mission Carlos promptly locked it away in one of the drawers in the lab and tried to put it out of his mind. 

He eventually limited himself to calling, not trusting himself anywhere near the station. Hearing Cecil's velvety voice on the other end of the line was almost too much sometimes, and he'd taken to writing out what we wanted to say before he called, in case his brain blanked in panic.

That, of course, wasn't always possible. Back when he was still investigating the clocks in Night Vale, he'd disassembled a bunch from around town only to find out that they were hollow, or else contained a mysterious gray hairy blob.

He'd called Cecil to ask him if all the clocks in Night Vale were this way and had gotten his voicemail. Carlos was more disappointed than he ought to be, but Scientist Carlos insisted that it would be easier this way—faster, more concise, less distracting. He started reading off his sheet of paper into Cecil's voicemail when all of a sudden there was a knocking at the lab door. It was odd because the only people who ever came to the lab apart from himself were the other scientists, and they didn't bother knocking. Carlos quickly hung up and crept closer to the door.

When he saw the Man in the Tan Jacket outside, he had a sudden urge to call Cecil again. If he was abducted or horribly murdered, he wanted someone to know. He wanted _Cecil_ to know. The thought came unbidden, but Scientist Carlos was powerless to stop himself from punching the speed dial. He was praying Cecil would pick up, that he might hear his voice one more time before he was terribly murdered. It almost crushed Carlos when it went to voicemail again. 

Carlos peered through the blinds of the window, narrating into the voicemail. Suddenly the Man in the Tan Jacket turned and Carlos was sure he'd seen his face, but he could never recall a single line of it. As though afraid the man would be able to trace Carlos' call and therefore endanger Cecil, Carlos quickly hung up again.

It was fuzzy as to what happened after that, but Carlos made sure to call Cecil again to let him know he was okay. Scientist Carlos insisted that that was sending entirely the wrong message, but Carlos didn't care and did it anyway. Carlos had meant to merely ask for Cecil to call him back and tell him the numbers of the mayor and the police, as he had business with them, but instead found himself asking if he could meet Cecil. The words were out before he knew it, but he didn't try to stop them. He was exhausted and terrified and all he wanted to do was drink in the baffling familiarity of the radio host’s presence and wrap himself in the security it gave him.

And then before he knew it it was one year later and there was this big to-do going on over at the bowling alley.

 

\--------

 

The days passed in a blur. The seriousness of what they had done weighed heavily on everyone's minds. Dorothy still had faith that her sister's method could work, but was beginning to second-guess their choice of subjects. The days crawled by and still Carlos lay in his coma, breathing soft and regular, while across the room Cecil lay just as still.

They thought they'd made contact—their brainwaves were still in sync—but it was impossible to know if everything had gone to plan. Neither subject showed signs of deterioration, but the longer the days stretched the less likely this would work. The longer Carlos delayed, the more he would believe the world—whatever world it was in which he found himself in Cecil's head—was real, and the harder it would be for him to be able to remember the truth and for them to retrieve him. 

Outwardly, Harriet showed no signs of worry, instead broadcasting a calm, confident exterior for Thomas and the troupes of doctors that trudged in and out, some praising her work, others shaking their heads and claiming that inducing a coma where it was not needed was a direct breach of their Hippocratic Oath. Harriet always responded by producing the first document they'd had Carlos sign, the one that stated he was doing this voluntarily and of his own free will. 

Though it never once actually registered in the minds of any of the doctors or nurses passing through, there was a small television in the corner of the room constantly broadcasting the news. It was on almost all the time, and though the volume was usually turned down, it was still audible when the room was very still and quiet.

A lot of stuff was happening in California and across the nation, fascinating news that absolutely no one paid any mind to, except perhaps the two unconscious figures lying in their beds...

There was news about laws passed by the Los Angeles City Council, a story about the Himalayas and how they are constantly growing in height a quarter of an inch every year, a regular segment on religion that followed a man who claimed to have seen angels, arrests made by the police and their chief, a man named Henry Sheriff, stories about a helicopter crash in the Rockies and yet another blunder by the FBI. There was a segment about a new trend among teenagers to wear dark hoodies and how this might lead to more violence on the streets. The death of two young people at a fire at the Public Library was covered, along with the discovery of broken books in the wreckage, spines torn from pages from covers. Then there was the health scare in Kansas City, where a shipment of wheat to a local processing plant turned out to have been infected with a rare bacterium, and the recalls were off the scale.

There was a hailstorm the third day in, and the sound of the hail pinging off the window echoed in the room and prompted the reporter on the television to remark that it sounded like it was raining cats and dogs out there, as the lightning brightened up the ward in sudden flashes. Then the storm knocked out some power grids and broke the heater in the wing Carlos and Cecil were in and, though they piled on blankets and turned up the emergency space heaters, for a couple minutes a freezing cold gripped everyone.

Then, less than a week in, Cecil's heart gave a flutter. It wasn't unusual in coma patients, as the chronic lack of exercise weakened the heart, but it was enough of a flutter to send Harriet into a frenzy, triple checking everything and making sure the retrieval program was up to date and would work if they needed to pull Carlos out if something happened to Cecil. There was no guarantee the program would work if Cecil was in the middle of dying, but it was the best they could hope for. 

And the TV droned on. There was the fireworks show above the Grand Canyon that was simply breathtaking, the discovery of philosophical texts etched into hieroglyphics at one of the pyramids at Giza, a story about feral dogs attacking citizens outside New York City, and then of course the race for Los Angeles City Mayor as the voting season neared, the primary candidates being an outspoken man thought to have committed insurance fraud in past and a woman concerned with better living and more affordable housing for everyone. Then a bank in Olympia was robbed and the only suspect was a man in a tan jacket last seen leaving the bank with a mysterious briefcase thought to contain the stolen goods. And then there was street cleaning day, and it wasn't even Thanksgiving and already everyone was selling Valentine's Day candy. Then there was a segment on the evils of cloning according to certain religious groups, and a sandstorm that stirred the Salt Lake flats. And then there was a segment on bowling alleys in this economy, followed by a look at the new movie based off _Gulliver's Travels_.

And then it was one month later.


	3. One Month to Remember

The underground city beneath the pin retrieval area of Lane 5 at the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex was simply absurd.

Carlos scratched at his ear as George relayed to him the latest information from the bowling alley. It appeared the distant city's residents were about to launch their attack on Night Vale. It didn't bother him overmuch, as the city had caused very little real trouble thus far, but it sounded like this time everyone was making a very big fuss about it.

Carlos was in his lab, entering data from a table into a spreadsheet on his laptop for the computer to construct into a graph. This was the sort of work he usually left for his team to do—it was about the highest level of difficulty they could handle—but he had, quite strangely, been missing the chore and thought he'd enter some numbers himself. 

"Are you going to check it out?" asked George, his hair still a vibrant red. He refused to acknowledge a time when it had been any other color.

"No, I don't think so," Carlos replied, not looking up from the laptop.

"I think you should," George said hesitantly, and Carlos looked up at him over the rims of his glasses.

"Why do you say that?"

"Well, you've been all around Night Vale this past year," George said slowly, choosing his words with care. "You've been to the sand wastes and John Peters' invisible farm and the Public Library and the House That Doesn't Exist—"

"Your point being?"

"Well, in all this time you've been here, you haven't actually been to the bowling alley yet."

"So?" 

"How do you know there isn't something weird going on?" 

Carlos laughed and leaned back in his chair. "Weird?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. The irony was lost on George. "Well, I may not have been there in person, but I sent you guys, remember? I've got all the readings right here." He gestured to the lab. "And let me assure you that the bowling alley is no weirder than anywhere else in Night Vale." He turned back to his laptop and entered a few numbers. 

George didn't move. 

Carlos sighed and sat back again. "Yes?"

"But you've never even seen the underground city," George protested. "Surely that's... _weird_...enough for you?"

Carlos shook his head. "Not really. I'm more interested in these energy fluctuations by the Ralph's." He tapped the screen. 

"Surely a scientist needs to observe all the evidence with his own eyes," George argued. "In order to ensure he arrives at the correct conclusions."

Carlos was impressed. This was probably the longest and most complex conversation he had ever had with George, or any of the scientists for that matter. Usually he only got this level of response from Cecil. He'd decided a long time ago that it was a Night Vale thing. People didn't talk much. He assumed Cecil was just well versed, being a radio host and all. 

Carlos leaned forward, fixing George with his steady gaze. "That's entirely true, George. And, you know, since that just now was the most intelligent thing you've ever said, I'll go. Happy?"

George beamed.

Carlos closed the laptop with a click. If this underground city was important enough to jolt Copernicus into intelligent conversation, maybe it _was_ worth checking out. And where was the harm in a little road trip?

Carlos checked to make sure everything was off that needed to be, leaving some of the sensors on to collect data while he was out, and followed George out the door.

The bowling alley was across town, so Carlos drove him and George there. The bowling alley's parking lot was small and full of cars, so Carlos pulled into the mostly empty Arby's parking lot across the street. For the entire drive, George didn't say a thing. Evidently his spurt of lucidity was over. The Apache Tracker that Cecil didn't like very much was standing near the entrance. His feathered headdress shook in the light wind. He gave Carlos a long, unnerving look as the scientist entered.

The interior of the alley was much like Carlos had expected: worn linoleum floors, dark walls, and a large space taken up by tables along the back and oiled lanes in the front. Off to the right an archway opened up into the arcade section. In the back of the room, a middle aged man sat, grumbling to himself and surrounded by a group of friends and relatives. He wore a conical party hat. 

The sight reminded him that Cecil had invited him to a sort of hey-you-survived-here-for-one-year-hooray! party later that day, and he resolved to head over there just as soon as he'd sated George's curiosity. And, as a matter of fact, his own. He _was_ just a _little_ intrigued as to how an underground city had managed to manifest itself in the back of a bowling alley, but it was by far not the strangest thing he'd heard.

Carlos walked around to the back of the lanes where a large group of people clustered around the pin retrieval area of Lane 5. As he approached, a man Carlos assumed was the owner of the bowling alley ran up to him and started ranting in his face about invasions and the end of the world. Carlos tried to push past him, but he refused to budge. 

"I'm going to get to the bottom of this, don't worry," Carlos said in as calm of a voice as he could muster. "George, try to calm him down, would you?" Carlos pushed past him, George trailing uncertainly behind and stopping next to the man as Carlos pushed to the front of the crowd.

And there it was, right down in the pin retrieval area like everyone said: an underground city. It occurred to Carlos right away, though, that it was _not_ an underground city. The lighting was all wrong, the way the geometry of the pit met...did no one realize?

Carlos backed away.

 

\--------

 

Dorothy was on duty when it happened. She was sitting in her usual spot, between Carlos and Cecil's prone forms, reading a paperback and keeping an eye on the equipment in case either patient showed any change. They were quite well-behaved, though, and their vitals were running smoothly, so she was quite immersed in her book when the lights flickered.

She looked up, surprised, and then the room started shaking. At first it was just a tremble, almost imperceptible, but then there was a sound like cracking china and the window shattered, splintering glass all over Carlos. Dorothy sprang to her feet, torn between saving Cecil, saving Carlos, and saving herself. She finally jumped towards Cecil, because he was closer of the two, and grabbed onto the edge of his bed to steady herself as the room jumped and twisted to the left. A ceramic vase near the window slid off its perch and crashed to the floor.

Dorothy was still clutching the edge of Cecil's bed when she looked across the room at the table of equipment by the far wall. She watched, horrified, as the equipment started sliding, slipping inexorably towards the edge. She made a quick decision and lunged across the room. She got there just in time to heave the first of the falling equipment back onto the table, papers and pens cascading around her onto the floor. Her water bottle jittered and fell onto the floor and rolled under Carlos' bed. She was still holding the equipment on the first table when, on the _other_ side of the room, the second table of equipment started to tilt. The laptop, still displaying two bouncing waves in sync, juddered toward the edge of the table. 

"No no no no," she whispered in horror. Dorothy pushed back against the equipment on the table behind her, and then ran across the room, reaching for the laptop...she just barely managed to put herself between the equipment and the floor before the laptop hit the ground. The rest of the equipment followed after, and the sudden weight pushed her hard onto the floor, causing her head and shoulders to collide with the bottom half of Carlos' bed. There was a sharp snap of plastic and she twisted to see Carlos' bed falling away from her as the supports failed. The bed capsized towards the window like a doomed ship seeking sunlight before the end. She was powerless to act as she heard the dull thump of Carlos hitting the floor.

The ground did one last roll, rattled the lights, and fell still. There was a singular moment of silence before the machines started beeping, all of them at once. For a moment Dorothy just sat there in shock, half sitting and half lying, surrounded by cables and equipment and shards of plastic. She carefully pushed the equipment off her onto the floor and stood up shakily, grabbing the edge of the table for stability. She staggered around to the other side of Carlos' bed, shoes crunching on a thin carpet of glass, expecting the worst. Carlos had only rolled a couple of feet, and was lying on his back against the wall. He looked more or less in one piece. She breathed deeply in relief and raised a hand to her forehead. She realized she was bleeding, probably from her collision with the edge of the hospital bed.

That was when Harriet rushed in, Thomas right on her heels. 

"What happened?" Harriet cried, staring around at the wreckage and looking as though she might cry.

"The...the...it..." Dorothy gestured hopelessly at the room.

"Are you okay? Is anyone hurt?" Thomas asked, coming forward to grip her gently by the upper arms. He could tell she was going into shock. "Breathe, Dorothy. Look at me. Breathe."

Harriet walked past them, gazing at the fallen equipment. She saw Carlos lying on the floor and righted the hospital bed. It resisted her attempts to render it stable, and eventually she settled for just keeping it upright.

"No, no, no, no!" came Thomas' voice from across the room, where he was staring at the laptop on the floor. It had miraculously managed to remain connected to the rest of the equipment, though the screen was clouded with error messages with words like "disconnected" and "offline" on them. He grabbed the laptop and shoved it back onto the table. His fingers clicked away urgently at the keyboard.

"What is it?" Harriet asked immediately.

"They're coming out of sync. Carlos is pulling away...does he look like he's coming out of it?" 

Harriet, halfway to Thomas' side to check the readings herself, turned back to Carlos, lying surrounded by a wreath of crushed glass and blue ceramic shards. His face was still and maybe a little paler than usual, but showed no signs of movement. 

She walked around to Carlos' head and pulled back an eyelid to look at his pupil.

"He's still under, looks like. Thomas, come help me carry him over there so he's off this glass." 

He came around to help, but as Harriet reached down around Carlos' armpits, her hands grew sticky and warm. She froze, a terrible wave of certainty crashing over her. She looked again at the crushed glass and large blue ceramic shards of what might have once been a vase scattered around Carlos like a halo. "Get a doctor," she said in her calmest voice.

 

\--------

 

He tried to explain to everyone what was going on, but no one listened.

Finally, sighing exasperation, Carlos called everyone together and approached the edge of the pit. Obviously he would have to prove it to them.

The city was arrayed below them, all spires and little buildings, tiny figures moving about, shouting and chanting and rallying their forces. Everyone gasped in fear, but Carlos just stepped down. It took three footholds to reach the bottom of the pit, which was, as had seemed perfectly clear to him, only ten feet deep.

The crowd gasped in disbelief and gazed down at him in shock.

"Look," Carlos said, raising his hands to indicate the city. "This is not an enormous city miles below the earth. It is a very small city about ten feet below the earth, populated by tiny people who have spent all year slowly climbing the ten feet to our world!" They seemed unconvinced by his reassuring words, so he added, "We have nothing to fear."

For a time they all looked at each other and back at Carlos and shook their heads. They seemed to believe him, though. Carlos, sensing his work here was done, began to look around for a way to climb back out. He hadn't thought that far ahead. Perhaps George could throw him a rope.

He had only taken a single step towards the wall before he felt it. At first it was just pricks, all along his shins, then a sudden pain on his left foot, like he'd stepped on a tack. He jumped a little and looked down, arms instinctively raised in the air. Below him, crawling over his shoes and swarming around them, were the citizens of the tiny underground city. It was comical for about two seconds, and then Carlos realized he had made a severe tactical error.

More and more pricks were radiating up his shins, as far as his knees. Carlos tried retracting his foot, and in doing so accidentally smashed it against the side of one of the buildings. As his foot exploded in a haze of heat and pain, Carlos realized with a tremor that they had pinned miniature explosives to his shoe.

Carlos had a split second to choose which way to run, and tried backwards. His feet stumbled over pinpricks, and then tiny guns were were shooting up into his shins. In his haste to escape, he slammed the back of his foot into another building, and staggered. His free hand found the wall of the pit just in time.

It was enough of an opening. Now there were strings, tiny ropes reaching from his thighs to the ground, and tangled in his lab coat, pulling him in a dozen directions, impeding his movement.

Something exploded near one of his feet, and as he tried to jerk his leg away it only served to dig the projectiles farther in, tiny meat hooks tearing at his skin. He tried to swat at the tiny people with his hands, tried to tear the strings away, but it only sent shudders of pain up his shins and through his arm as the tiny hooks dug themselves into his forearm next, ripping through his lab coat sleeve.

It was too late to try to escape. The more he tried to free himself, the more entangled he became. Then an explosion behind his knees caused his left leg to buckle and he went down onto one knee in some terrible satire of a marriage proposal. Now they were focusing on the explosives, some of which were being shot at his chest, exploding and tearing pain across his midsection. He could hear the shocked cries of the onlookers above, but they seemed rooted to the spot in shock, or else were powerless to help. Carlos didn't blame them. 

There were more explosions, now up his elbows and along his shoulder blades, peppering the sides of his neck and his collarbones. He tried to put a hand down to steady himself, but crushed a battalion and the palm of his hand came back covered in his own blood.

Carlos was beginning to feel light headed. He looked up, only able to get the side of the pit in view. He felt himself falling forwards, pulled by a hundred tiny ropes and propelled by explosions from behind. He tried to stop his fall, but his arms were too slow to respond.

He wished he'd seen Cecil one last time.

He hit the ground with a thud that must have been deafening to the tiny army, but, if anything, they swarmed harder, and Carlos felt even more pain along his front, as though he were lying in nettles. Any movement hurt. Breathing hurt. His face was turned, cheek stinging against who-knew-what in the street between the tiny buildings.

He tried to think about science—what about his mission? His mission was so important—but all he could think about was Cecil. Cecil's voice, smooth and deep, Cecil's gorgeous hair, the turn of his head and the sound of his laugh, memories of jokes and smiles shared, experiences that Carlos did not remember having experienced, but that filled him with comfort and sadness and despair for the times that would never be but nonetheless stood out so brightly in his mind.  

And then there was a sharp explosion by his back and a sound like shelves falling over, and nothing.

 

\--------

 

Slowly Carlos became aware of a few things. There was a faint light filtering through his closed eyelids, and his back ached painfully, as well as his shoulders and everywhere he felt like he'd been poked with needles. He cracked his eyes open, and found himself staring up at a white tile drop ceiling.

Carlos blinked a few times and his vision blurred. Then it cleared and the ceiling had darkened to a grayish black. He turned his head slightly to the side, and the dark colors of the bowling alley swirled into view. Nothing white in sight. 

He remembered what had happened in the pin retrieval area. 

He wanted to see Cecil.

Carlos paused. How had he survived? He sat up, his head, back, and shoulders protesting. 

"Not so fast," the bowling alley owner said from his left. Carlos turned his head and saw, beyond the man, another figure lying on the cold linoleum floor, this one arrayed in colorful feathers. 

"The Apache Tracker?" Carlos rasped, more in recognition than anything.

"He went in after you. Pulled you out."

Carlos' eyebrows contracted, causing a fresh ripple of pain to burst along the left side of his face. "Why...?" he started. He had never even talked to the tracker.

The man shrugged.

"Will he be all right?"

The bowling alley owner looked away and shook his head ever so slightly.

Carlos looked past him, at the still figure lying on the linoleum. He had never considered himself very much worth saving, but this...it had been his own fault he'd been trapped down there. No one owed him anything, and no one should have felt obligated to save him—least of all a man Carlos had never even spoken to.

As he watched, the figure stirred a little and gasped out some words, his hand grasping at someone standing above him. Carlos didn't understand what he said, but the man nodded and smiled and then the tracker's arm went limp.

Carlos stared at him. He should not have been saved, he knew that much. He was a visitor, a stranger, an outsider. He had no friends outside his team of scientists—if you could even call them friends. They were more like servants, hanging on his every word and refusing to have an opinion unless it mirrored his own. He had been in Night Vale an entire year, and there was not a single person in the town that Carlos would have marked as a friend. 

It had not bothered him before that moment, never even crossed his mind. He was a scientist on a mission, after all. All those nights alone just gave him more time to get his work done.

But all of a sudden it bothered him—it bothered him a lot. 

Carlos tried to sit up farther, but he hurt everywhere. He inspected his arms and legs—some large areas of blood, but mostly just small scratches and pinpricks. He searched himself for projectiles (thankfully most of them had fallen out) and tore them from his skin. He was still very lightheaded, and his breathing was shorter and tighter than he would have liked, but he was getting the impression that he, at least, would be okay. And across the room the Apache Tracker lay dead.

His thoughts again strayed to Cecil, beautiful Cecil, and found himself aching to be with him. He was shaking, shaking with delayed fear and adrenaline and shock, and all he wanted was to be with Cecil, wanted it so bad it hurt.

He fumbled with his phone, tearing it out of his pocket. He staggered to his feet and, using the wall as support, made his way outside, ignoring the stares of the onlookers. Once in the cool fresh air, he leaned against the brick wall and hit the speed dial for Cecil, the only speed dial in his phone.

He was starting to feel lightheaded again, and pressed his head back against the wall, hard, praying Cecil would pick up. After four rings it went to voicemail, and Carlos had to blink back tears. It was just so _unfair_. He slid down the wall into a sitting position and didn't leave a message.

Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. He was on a mission, after all. He couldn't afford to be distracted.

All of a sudden this argument, which he'd been using all year to dedicate himself to his work wholeheartedly, seemed very flimsy. He had almost _died_. Everything seemed a little clearer now. His mission was important, yes, but it wasn't everything. And there was nothing that said that he had to complete his mission alone. There was no reason he couldn't see Cecil _and_ continue his work studying Night Vale. If anything, it might increase his productivity. 

So he swiped to the texting screen on his phone and sent Cecil a short text: "Can I see you? Could you meet me at the Arby's parking lot?" He hit "send" and leaned his head back, trying to get control over his racing heart. He was still trying to catch his breath when George came outside.

"There you are!" he cried. "I've been looking everywhere for you."

Carlos had entirely forgotten him. "Sorry," he said. "Needed some fresh air."

George nodded but didn't move.

"You can go home if you like," Carlos said.

George wavered. "What about you?" 

"I'll be all right. I've got my car," he said, gesturing weakly at the Arby's. 

George nodded again but didn't move. "What if—" 

"I'll be fine," Carlos repeated, too tired to argue anymore. "Just go home, please." He closed his eyes. He ached everywhere.

George seemed to ponder this, then mumbled something in assent and wandered off.

Carlos waited until he was sure he was gone, and then made the short walk across the street to the Arby's parking lot and his waiting car. His legs felt like they were on fire, and he was seeing stars by the time he reached his car.

He wanted to be visible when Cecil arrived, so he sat on the trunk of his car, shivering and hoping the radio host wouldn't take too long. _If he shows up at all._ Carlos pushed the thought away. Cecil was probably just in the middle of his show. It might be a while. Carlos stared at the setting sun and tried to convince himself that Cecil was actually going to show up. 

Thankfully, it was hardly five minutes before Cecil's car pulled up. Carlos tried to sit up a little straighter, but it hurt to move. Cecil parked and got out, and the sight of him made Carlos forget all about science and missions. 

Cecil hurried over; he looked distressed, and his nose and eyes were a little too red.

"Are you all right?" Cecil asked, the concern in his beautiful voice plain. His eyes tracked over Carlos' tattered lab coat.

Carlos shrugged, and it hurt. Now that Cecil was here, he suddenly didn't know what to do. 

"So what is it?" Cecil asked. "What danger are we in? What mystery needs to be explored?"

Carlos shook his head, and realized for the first time that he had only ever used Cecil in a professional capacity. He'd only called when things were in dire straits, when he needed Cecil to do something for him...and he realized how utterly unfair that was. Cecil had been nothing but good to him, and all Carlos did was call in favors. "Nothing," Carlos said, feeling the guilt of a thousand impersonal phone calls crashing down on him. "After everything that happened…I just wanted to see you.”

He watched Cecil carefully, looking for a reaction. If Cecil turned and left, Carlos thought he might just go back to the underground city and let them finish him off.

Cecil was still for a moment, and Carlos couldn't tell what was going through his head, but thought he saw a flicker of a smile.

"Oh?" he said, very quietly, a request for confirmation. 

Carlos just looked at him, drinking him in. His lungs burned and his shoulders ached and every inch of skin stung, but for a moment none of that mattered. 

He tore his gaze from Cecil and looked at the sun, setting over the little desert town. "I used to think it was setting at the wrong time, but then I realized that time doesn’t work in Night Vale, and that none of the clocks are real." He paused and looked down at his hands. He heard rather than saw Cecil sit down on the trunk next to him. "Sometimes things seem so strange, or malevolent, and then you find that, underneath, it was something else altogether, something pure, and innocent."

There was a pause. "I know what you mean," Cecil said.

After a moment Carlos couldn't stand it any longer and put his hand on Cecil's knee, half afraid he would pull away. But instead he leaned in, and put his head on Carlos' shoulder and together they looked up at the twinkling sky above them, the dancing lights above the Arby's, and stayed that way. 

After a couple of minutes Cecil murmured something into Carlos' ear about how he hated to leave but he really had to be getting back because he still had to finish the show, and Carlos was loathe to see him go, but the knowledge that he would be back was comfort enough. 

Carlos slid off the trunk of his car and went around to open the driver's door as Cecil drove off. He glanced up at the twinkling sky one last time...and for a moment a shadow passed over them. Carlos frowned, and a moment later the lights returned, but a bone-chilling feeling of dread had already taken hold of him. He kept his eyes on the heavens, but they remained as starry and constant as ever. Unable to shake the feeling of dread, he got in his car and slowly drove back to his apartment.

 

\--------

 

"He's stabilized for now," the doctor said, studying Carlos' vitals. "But he's still showing signs of deterioration."

"But what does that mean?" Thomas asked from beside the door. "For those of us without MDs?" 

The three scientists and the doctor were all clustered together in room 212, Carlos on one side and Cecil on the other.

The doctor shook his head. "The ceramic shard dug straight into his back near his spine. He's lucky he avoided paralysis. You have to understand that coma patients are especially susceptible to injury. And he's not healing as well or as quickly as he should be. Even coma patients heal, but he's doing an especially poor job of it. A wound like that should be easily survivable, but he's just not improving like he should be." 

"Is that because..." 

The doctor shrugged. "I don't deal a lot with psychology, but if your experiment is working and he is currently floating around in his friend's head instead of his own, it's possible that could have an effect on his body's healing patterns. If he doesn't pick up soon, I'd give him a month on the outside, more if the medication is effective."

"And there's nothing else we can give him?" Dorothy asked, already knowing the answer. 

"We're doing all we can."

"But he can't fight it while he's under," Harriet finished, her voice flat. 

The doctor nodded uncomfortably. "If he pulled out of the coma, he may be able to make a full recovery, but not in this state."

Harriet nodded. "Do you think we should pull him out, then?" 

The doctor shrugged. "It's your experiment, and he signed the paperwork. You're the expert here, I don't have to remind you."

She gave him a sour look and turned away. She looked down at Carlos, pale and shivering just a little, already piled high with blankets that hid the broad white bandage across his chest. Nothing like this had happened with the other pairs, but he had been just so adamant about going in after Cecil. Her eyes slid to the light-haired man, sleeping peacefully.

She was reminded how, after their brainwaves had briefly fallen out of sync during the earthquake, they'd latched back together again, with astonishing speed...maybe she should wait. Just a little longer, to give him more time. Maybe he was very close.

She turned back. "We leave him under for now," she decided. "Like you said, he's my patient, and I say we give him a little more time."

 

\--------

 

It was a week or two before Carlos mustered the courage to call Cecil again. He'd been trying to bury himself in his work, remind himself of his mission, but it wasn't working very well.

He and Cecil went out for dinner, and then Carlos, still feeling guilty about not getting work done, went and took some samples of the trees in Mission Grove Park. He was having trouble separating the mission and Cecil in his mind. He wanted to spend time with the radio host, but every time they were together he felt like he really needed to be working on his mission, so he took every opportunity to study Night Vale, even though even he noticed it put a damper on their time together. 

The days again slid together, and the sense of urgency in his quest heightened. It was as though there were a timer in his head, ticking away the amount of time left to him. Despite the extra pressure, he found these days of work more pleasurable than the first years' worth. His mind would wander as he took readings around town or prepared microscope slides, and for the first time he could think about Cecil without feeling guilty about it. He found himself looking forward more to his time with Cecil than with his work, and had conflicted feelings about that. 

His scratches from the encounter with the tiny underground city had healed, but his shoulders still ached periodically and occasionally his back would sear with pain and he'd have to go lie down. He did his best to hide this from Cecil, knowing that he would worry. 

And he was seeing the darkness more and more. At first it was just a dark shadow, blotting out the sun or the moon or the lab lights, but it always passed within a few seconds. Then it started happening more often, and longer, and the darkness wasn't just a hazy silhouette anymore. It had started coalescing, into teeth and claws and stretches of dark skin and the glint of dark eyes. At first he thought it was just another strange Night Vale phenomenon, until the day it appeared on the ceiling of the lab. 

Nikola and Shroe were working nearby, and when he caught sight of it he jumped backwards, almost knocking over a beaker. He made a save and steadied it, then backed up as far as he could against the wall. He waited for it to disappear as it always did, but it lingered, swirling in impossible contours to form a sort of gaping maw, spinning closer to reveal rows and rows of teeth, like a shark. Carlos ducked down behind a table and when he peeked over the edge a moment later it was dissolving away into nothing. He stood up and brushed himself off, only to see Nikola and Shroe staring at him, tasks forgotten.

"What?" he asked. Maybe there was a different protocol for behavior around swirling black shadow monsters? 

"What are you doing?" Shroe asked, looking like he'd lost his mind.

Carlos gestured to the ceiling. "Getting away from that, of course."

They looked at the ceiling and then back at him. "There's nothing there," Nikola said.

"We'll not _now,_ " Carlos said, exasperated. "A moment ago." 

They gave him those strange looks again. 

"Nothing happened a moment ago," Shroe said.

Now it was Carlos' turn to give them an incredulous look _._  

"You're telling me you didn't just see a giant swirling vortex mouth on the ceiling just now?" 

They shook their heads, both looking concerned.

"Are you feeling all right?" asked Shroe. Nikola nodded to echo her sentiments.

They didn't look like they were joking.

From then on, Carlos kept an eye on other people when the shadow creature appeared. No one else ever noticed it, not so much as a blink or a shiver. It would stalk him when he was driving or taking readings, and it lurked out of the corner of his eye on dates with Cecil. Luckily it hadn't yet fully manifested in the middle of a date, because Carlos was certain Cecil would think him loony and he was about the only person Carlos would've minded thinking that about him. 

He tried observing it scientifically. He pointed the thermal scanner at it and got a no-heat black result, like the House That Doesn't Exist. It, as far as he could tell, emitted no light, no heat, and no radiation. Not only did it not exist, it was the opposite of existence. It was like a black hole, swallowing anything Carlos could throw at it. Really. He threw a mug at it once, and he never heard it hit the ground. He never saw the mug again. He even rigged up some gravitational detectors, and found that its mass was infinite. 

And the most worrying thing was that it was staying longer and longer, and getting closer and closer. Once he awoke in the middle of the night with the certainty he was about to be murdered, and saw it swirling around on his ceiling, reaching tendrils down as though to kiss him. He'd rolled out of bed and run into the bathroom and barricaded the door, but the creature had seeped through the door like it wasn't even there. Carlos had cowered in the farthest part of the room (the shower) and the creature had been only three feet from him when it halted its advance and faded from existence with what sounded like a frustrated hiss. It was so close Carlos could have touched it. 

From then on he slept fitfully, and always with a clear path to a door. Whenever he walked into a room he glanced over his shoulder and counted the exits. His paranoia was not lost on his team, but they didn't say anything. If he didn't think them incapable of independent thought, he'd have thought they gossiped behind his back. 

Life in Night Vale marched on as usual. There was an alarming influx of gray shadow people Carlos had to figure out how to subdue, and then the sudden appearance of a subway throughout town that broke several laws of physics. There was news of a blinking light on a mountain, and Cecil talked to him about a strange cassette he'd found as a kid that he didn't remember making (that was the first time it occurred to Carlos that they might all be hypnotized, and he insisted on trying some techniques on Cecil to bring him out of it if he was in it, but nothing happened and Cecil looked like he was having far too much fun anyway). Then there was the disappearance of Tamika Flynn, and a strange auction at which Carlos could not resist buying the lot named "Cecil Palmer" and then a serious problem with all the oranges.

And then Carlos and Cecil went on a date.

 

\--------

 

The days slipped by alarmingly fast with nothing but bad news running their way. Carlos was deteriorating further every day, and they worried over whether or not to pull him out, and which one would be kinder. It was possible the dream world with Cecil would be more pleasant than this one for his final hours, but it was also possible he was trapped in a nightmare and was begging them to pull him out. Harriet worried over this nonstop, hovering over her patients and equipment. She eventually decided that she would give him the full month, and if he was still alive by then, they'd pull him out. 

And the voice on the television droned on, still at just a little louder than mute. There was a segment about the horrors of atomic warfare and how the only thing left of some of the people when the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were their shadows. There was a piece about the new subway getting installed in L.A., and the thrilling story of a man who'd gotten lost in the Alps hiking during an avalanche but had made it out by walking all the way to a weather station, following the blinking broadcast light through a snowstorm. Then there was the abduction of young Tamika Flynn from her middle school, and the ongoing search for her. There was a segment about "the auction of the century" at which would be sold some of the most precious and unusual objects in history, and then a surprise snowstorm in Florida crippled many of the orange groves, and a severe orange shortage was predicted for the following year.

The hospital finally managed to contact Cecil's family, who had been vacationing on an obscure island in the tropics. However, the island was so incredibly obscure that no planes or boats hardly ever went there except when they'd been previously scheduled, and the best they got was a five minute call on a pre-paid card that was a very one-sided conversation spoken primarily by Cecil's brother with an occasional word from his mother.

And then the month was almost over.

 

\--------

 

After Cecil had finished the broadcast for the day, he swung around to Carlos' lab to pick him up for their date.

Carlos was busy trying to reconcile two different readings of electromagnetism from different sides of the town (the readings being off by at least a factor of five) when Cecil knocked. Carlos hadn't been putting a great deal of effort into the readings, more staring at them in the hopes that an answer would suddenly spring from the page into his lap, as sometimes happened. His thoughts were on other things. When the musical knock came at the door, Carlos started guiltily from his daydreams and stood abruptly, knocking the chair back a couple of inches. He smoothed himself down, checking to make sure his collar was lying flat and his hair wasn't sticking up in the back. Satisfied, he made the five strides to the door and opened it, giving a wide smile.

Cecil mirrored his expression and gave him a peck on the cheek that made him blush. He glanced around, embarrassed, but Cecil simply grabbed him by the wrist and led him to the car.

Cecil drove the ten minutes or so to the Night Vale Harbor and Waterfront Recreation Area, where they planned to hang out, and parked.

Although it was forbidden to criticize the decisions that had brought about the building of a harbor and waterfront recreation area in an area totally devoid of bodies of water, the harbor and waterfront nevertheless remained an open area to walk or play or go on dates when the people pointing at the sky and shouting in Mission Grove Park grew a little much. 

The harbor and waterfront consisted of a long line of buildings fronted by a broad porch lifted up off the ground several feet. The boards were new and straight and flush, and the buildings freshly painted, not yet worn by the sand swirled up by the desert wind. Cecil led Carlos up onto the boardwalk and they strode along it, passing the empty storefronts on their left. A smooth expanse of sand and dirt stretched away to the right. It was almost like water, Carlos imagined, just gray-orange instead of blue-green. 

The two of them walked about halfway down—there was no one else in sight—and sat down on the edge of the boardwalk, dangling their feet over the edge. The ground was about two feet beneath their shoes. Cecil wasted no time in snuggling up next to Carlos and resting his head on his shoulder.

It was a common location for Cecil's head. Sometimes they just sat together and didn't even bother with words, just enjoyed each others' company like they had that night in the Arby's parking lot. Carlos couldn't put his finger on it, but sheer proximity to Cecil just seemed so incredibly... _right._

Cecil sighed into Carlos' shoulder and asked him how his science was going.

This was a common topic of discussion. Carlos would listen to Cecil on the radio and then they would discuss the weird happenings in town, and Carlos would talk about science. There seemed little else _to_ talk about. Carlos tried to remember things he'd talked about on previous dates with other people, but, once again, the more he tried to remember anything from before his arrival in Night Vale, the more clear and alarming it was that he didn't remember anything.

Carlos shuffled these thoughts from his head and started telling Cecil about those equations he couldn't reconcile. Talking it out usually helped, he found, because after he'd discussed it with Cecil and returned to the equations later, it seemed the numbers just _worked_.

He was struggling over how to best explain the nature of the problem, and trying simultaneously to ignore the tickle of Carlos' hair on his neck as the warm desert breeze ruffled it, when he saw the shape. 

It was in the distance, obscuring the horizon, a hazy shadow that chilled Carlos to the very bone. 

 _No. Not here. Not with Cecil._  

Carlos sat up straighter and blinked several times, and felt Cecil start to pull away. 

"Wha—?" Carlos yanked his eyes off the creature to look at Cecil's puzzled expression, and when he looked back, it was gone. Just the sandy ground expanding featurelessly to the horizon. 

"What is it?" asked Cecil, and Carlos could hear the concern in his voice. The radio host followed Carlos' gaze, looking out over the desert expanse, and then looked back at Carlos. "What?" he asked again. 

Carlos prayed Cecil couldn't see the fear in his eyes as he stood up, dusting his pants off. "Let's, um, let's move back here, shall we?" Carlos fast-walked away from the edge of the porch, towards the imagined safety of the buildings. 

"Carlos? What—what is it?" 

Carlos reached the edge of the buildings and turned, keeping his back to the storefronts so he could keep the entire desert in his field of vision. Cecil was hurrying towards him from the edge of the boardwalk, and Carlos realized he had left him behind.

Carlos closed the feet between him and Cecil to take him by the hand. "Nothing, nothing," he said unconvincingly, looking around wildly for any sign of the creature. Maybe he had imagined it. Maybe it wouldn't show up again. Maybe— 

"Carlos, what's going on?" Cecil's voice wavered.

Carlos turned to look at him and saw the alarm in his boyfriend's eyes. He forced himself to stop looking around, took a couple deep breaths to calm himself, and tried for a smile.

"Nothing. Hopefully," Carlos said, as lightly as he could. "Here, let's sit down over here." He gestured at a few steps going up into one of the empty storefronts.

They were halfway there when Cecil stopped abruptly.

Carlos halted. "What—?"

With no warning, Cecil grabbed Carlos by the arm and started dragging him sideways across the boardwalk. He looked terrified.

"Cecil? Wha—?"

Carlos stumbled along after Cecil and, following the radio host's petrified gaze, looked over his shoulder. 

And froze. 

The creature was right behind him. It was larger than before, and more formed and solid-looking, all dark sinew and muscle. Two distinct legs, broad and solid, cracked the wooden boardwalk, and two arms with impossibly long twitching fingers spun through the air. Dead black eye sockets stared out from a monstrous head topped with two swirling horns. One of the hands was stretched towards him, spindly barbed fingers only a foot away. 

Carlos stood rooted to the spot in horror, and it was only for Cecil dragging him backwards that he managed to evade its grasp. 

Carlos found his feet and turned. He grabbed at Cecil and the two of them ran across the boardwalk in the opposite direction as the monster. Carlos dashed between two buildings and pushed himself back against the wall of the alley. He spun Cecil around to a spot beside him. Carlos stuck his head around the corner to keep an eye on the creature.

"What is _station management doing so far out here?_ " Cecil gasped, breathless.

"Station—wait, you can see that?" Carlos spluttered, spinning his head back around to stare at Cecil. 

"Who can't?" Cecil asked in exasperation. 

"But—but—no one else in town can!" Carlos protested. "None of my scientists, or Old Woman Josie or the mayor or anyone! I thought I was crazy!"

"What? No! You're a scientist!" Cecil said, as though that should explain everything.

Carlos gave a small laugh, breathless, and stuck his head back around the building. The creature was lumbering towards them. He would have classified it as a minotaur if not for the tendril-like fingers that were several feet long and swirled around in the air like they had a mind of their own. 

"It's getting closer," Carlos reported. "What should we do?"

"It's between us and the car," Cecil said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the monster. "And this alley is a dead end. We'll have to make a run for it."

"Can we fight it?" Carlos asked.

Cecil shook his head adamantly. "Station management can't be fought, trust me. Your only option is to run and hide. And pray. Oh! And don't let it touch you."

"What happens if it touches you?" Carlos asked, risking another look around the corner. 

Cecil made a _tsk_ noise and drew a finger across his neck. "At least everyone in the station who did." 

Carlos took a breath and peered around the corner again. The creature was only twenty feet away. 

"We need to go, _now_ ," Carlos said. "You make straight for the car along the buildings, okay? Don't wait for me, just get in and drive. I'll lead it off."

"What? No!" Cecil protested, but Carlos was already gone. 

Carlos dashed across the open space, waving his arms and shouting. "Hey, you! You big ole ugly...turd face!" (Carlos didn't insult people very often.)

The creature turned to face Carlos and started lumbering towards him. Carlos didn't know where Cecil was, but prayed he was running as fast as he could to safety.

"Yeah, you sorry excuse for a monster! I've seen Scooby-Doo villains more terrifying than you!" Carlos was starting to get the hang of this, shouting insults while walking backwards as fast as he could to lead it away from the storefronts. "I bet your mother—"

The creature lashed out, lightning quick, and Carlos just barely dodged to the side. He staggered backwards, trying to put some distance between them, but the creature was quicker now, and more determined. The second attack came from the left. Carlos ducked and dodged to the right, but the barbed finger-like tendrils were longer then he'd thought, and ripped through his shoulder as though it were butter. The pain arced all the way to his back, and suddenly he hurt—suddenly he hurt very much. He cried out and, in his haste to stagger backwards, tripped.

The creature reared up in front of him in victory as Carlos tried scrambling backwards using his elbows, but his back hurt so very much and his shoulder was on fire, and he could only drag himself a few feet. The creature raised its black arms, tendrils swirling in preparation for the final attack, and thrust its hand towards Carlos. Carlos screwed his eyes shut and hoped Cecil had made it out alive.

"No!"

Carlos' eyes snapped open just in time to see Cecil leap between him and the creature's hand. The tendrils, still pointed straight at Carlos, speared straight through Cecil with a sound like breaking sticks and a drain being unplugged.

Carlos was sure he must have shouted, and for certain Cecil must have screamed, but then the creature was shifting and breaking apart and fading away, and the next thing Carlos knew, he was sitting on the ground cradling Cecil's head in his lap. 

One hand fluttered over Cecil's midsection, the other tangled itself in his hair. 

 _Not again. Oh, God, not again._  

There was a sharp tugging in Carlos' stomach. For a moment his vision blurred, and the ghostly white tile ceiling from earlier appeared in front of him. For a moment he was surrounded by urgent voices and high electrical beeping. Carlos, terrified, redoubled his grip on Cecil. The ceiling faded and the voices disappeared and Night Vale reasserted itself. 

Cecil was still conscious, gasping in hitched breaths, his eyes clouded. Carlos tried to form words, tried to think of something that would comfort Cecil, anything...Carlos felt his hand gripped by Cecil's. 

Carlos looked at it and back at Cecil. He smiled weakly. 

Cecil opened his mouth, coughed a little, and Carlos realized he was trying to say something. He put his head down close next to Cecil's. His voice was scratchy and hitched, so far from its usual honeyed tones. "Just...not my lucky day, then."

Carlos pulled his head back, staring at him. Cecil gave a pained half-smile that made him cough up a little blood, but Carlos just stared at him. _Nacho lucky day._

And then he remembered. 

All of a sudden there were two Cecils lying dying in his lap, two Cecils with beautiful hair stained red. Then he was in a street, and an ambulance, and a hospital, and there were women who said they could help, and there was Cecil, lying motionless in a hospital bed, the machinery beeping behind him, and Carlos crying and then hope and then the ceiling...the white tile ceiling and a fluorescent light and he was Carlos and he was a scientist and he was on a mission to save Cecil Palmer.

Carlos gasped and rocked back. In his lap, Cecil groaned and his grip on Carlos' hand tightened.

Carlos stared down at Cecil, finally seeing him for the first time.

"Cecil!" he gasped. He remembered what Harriet had said, what had to be done. But what happened when you died in your dreams? "Cecil, Cecil, you have to listen to me!"

He put his hands on either side of Cecil's face. He could tell Cecil was trying to meet his gaze, but his eyes were starting to wander and slip out of focus.

"Cecil, it's not real. It's all a dream. Night Vale isn't real." All of a sudden realizations were flooding over Carlos and suddenly Night Vale made _sense._ The team of scientists—of course! Famous scientists. Einstein, Newton, Tesla. The exhibit at the museum. And Steve Carlsberg—Cecil had told Carlos about him once; he was an old ex of Cecil's. And that strange man Kevin—there was a Kevin Davis at Cecil's work, and he'd gotten promoted ahead of Cecil, and Khoshekh! Of course; they had a cat back home. And the laws of physics here were all over the map—what did Cecil know of science?

Carlos redoubled his grip and willed Cecil to understand. He had remembered, after all. He had remembered and they should be okay now, wasn't that the deal? He just had to tell Cecil...but he wasn't sure Cecil could even hear him.

"It's not real, Cecil! You're in a coma right now, Cecil. Hear that? A coma. You imagined all this, all of Night Vale. Do you hear me, Cecil? You're sleeping. You just have to wake up. Wake up, Cecil! Please." 

Cecil's eyelids were growing heavy, and Carlos realized he was losing him.

Night Vale flickered.

It was just for a moment, and then it flickered again and returned, but behind them the outlines of the buildings in town were vanishing one by one and the end of the boardwalk was collapsing into nothing.

Carlos didn't know if it was flickering because it was working and Cecil was waking up, or because Cecil was dying and his mind was too. 

"Come on, Cecil! Just wake up! It's not real. None of this is real." Carlos couldn’t think of anything else to say. 

Cecil stirred back to consciousness for a moment, and the buildings held their course. “None of this is real,” Carlos repeated softly. He felt a warm tear slip down his cheek.

"Even you?" Cecil whispered, and Carlos saw the pain in his eyes. 

"No, no, I'm real. I'm real, Cecil," Carlos assured him, sniffling. "Just wake up and I'll be there, I'll be right there, Cecil, I promise. Just wake up, please."

Cecil might have given a slight nod, and then he shuddered all over and his eyes grew still.

Carlos felt another sharp tugging in his stomach and ignored it.

Night Vale was falling to pieces. The row of storefronts dissolved into nothing and the very boardwalk flickered and vanished. The sky blackened and the sun faded, and Night Vale was cast into eternal darkness. 

Carlos held onto Cecil as tightly as he could, praying that dying in dreams meant you woke up. 

The sharp tugging came for a third time and then Carlos' head was full of voices again.

"He's not retrieving."

"Damn, he won't make it otherwise."

"Their brainwaves won't un-sync."

"How's Cecil?"

Then a soft female voice, very loud and coming exclusively from his left, as though spoken into his ear: "Carlos, you need to wake up. You need to let go." 

Carlos didn't want to let go; he never wanted to let go of Cecil. But he understood that they were trying to wake him up, and knew he had to follow his own advice. Maybe Cecil would be waiting for him on the other side. He pried his hands from Cecil and laid him very carefully on the tiny patch of boardwalk which was the only thing left of Night Vale.

As soon as Carlos' hands left him, Cecil began to fade. The world around him faded to black and then dark red and then gray and Cecil felt like he was accelerating away, backwards, but his body was gone. Then there was a sudden burst of brightness in the gray and Carlos gasped and his eyes snapped open.

"—one." 

There was a clamor of sounds and sights. Harriet stood directly above him, pressing him back down into his bed as he tried to jerk into a sitting position, saying something about needing to lie still. Thomas was reeling off numbers and Dorothy was cheering and there was a sound like folding chairs and the click click of a keyboard and the drone of a TV on in the background, and through it all Carlos heard the soft, whispered word, pained but insistent, the only voice he cared to hear: 

"Carlos?"

Carlos twisted, ignoring Harriet's repeated directions to lie still. He had to see, had to make sure... 

Cecil was lying in the bed opposite, and he was awake. He was clinging to the edge of the bed with one hand, struggling to keep himself conscious, but he was awake. He looked strained and worried and exhausted beyond belief. When he saw Carlos, Cecil's face broke into a broad grin, and Carlos had never seen him look more relieved. They made eye contact for a beautiful forever, and then Cecil fell back onto his bed and Carlos was pushed back down into his own. He switched his attention to what Harriet was saying.

"—very still, I'll explain more later, okay?"

"Are we..." Carlos began, and was surprised at how small his own voice sounded, dusty from disuse. He swallowed. "It worked, then?" 

Harriet looked down at him, seeming to notice that he'd not been paying attention this whole time. Then she smiled, that same wide smile that lit up her whole face. "Yes. Yes, it worked. Thank you." 

Carlos laid his head back on the pillows, feeling incredibly tired. It was odd, he'd just spent the last...how long had he been out? He should ask later...unconscious, but all he wanted now was to fall asleep. 

Harriet smiled down at him. "You can go to sleep if you like," she said. "It'll take a few days to get you two back to normal, okay? A couple weeks in your case, actually. And then you're writing me a full report on what happened, you hear me?"

Carlos smiled wanly up at her. "The scientist's new mission?" he asked.

She looked confused, and Carlos realized with a start that only he and Cecil would remember what had happened in Night Vale.

He ran through all of it in his head as Thomas called Harriet over to look at something—George Copernicus and gravitational anomalies and man-eating books and all, not wanting to forget any of it, worried that it would fade away like a dream upon waking. 

It had been weird and dangerous and frankly quite terrifying, but he had been with Cecil and they had been together and that was the best feeling in the world.

As he slipped back into unconsciousness, his last thoughts were of winged angels and scientific impossibilities and the bravest radio host in all the world.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading and, as always, comments/kudos are welcome and appreciated! :)

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly, the 'nacho lucky day' joke I read on Tumblr a while back, so credit goes to whoever made it up! I just really like the joke. ;)
> 
> Secondly, when I was doing research into comas, I found a really interesting comment thread about what people experienced while in a coma. One user said they'd been in a coma for five years, and had spent those five years living in a white city populated with all manner of people and creatures. The way it's described really reminded me of Night Vale, so my idea might not be so far-fetched after all. Here's the link:
> 
> http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1s0kww/people_who_have_been_in_a_coma_do_you_remember/cdt2yck
> 
> At the top there's a "view the rest of the comments" button if you want to see the rest of the thread, which has some other really interesting stories in it from people's coma dreams.


End file.
